SCARLET WITCH: Page 10 of 12

BIOGRAPHY - part 10

After Wanda’s death, the full scope of the Apocalypse Twins’ treachery was laid bare, as their manipulations had also brought the wrath of the Celestials down upon the Earth. Exitar the Executioner destroyed the planet and all the humans on it, with the mutants safely aboard their space-ark headed towards Planet X. Six years later, the surviving Unity members Havok and Wasp finally brought down the tachyon dam on Planet X, allowing Thor and Kang to arrive and orchestrate a plan to undo the Rapture and save the Earth. The surviving members of the Unity Division had their minds cast backwards in time to before Rogue’s murder of Wanda in order to create a new sequence of events. [Uncanny Avengers (1st series) #15-20]

Rogue, Sunfire and Wolverine reached out to Wanda and Simon instead of working in opposition to them. Rogue in particular was horrified to hear how far she went in the original timeline, and was deeply apologetic towards Wanda, taking the first step towards mending fences between the two proud women. Rogue led the charge in delaying Exitar so Thor could reclaim the Celestial-killer axe Jarnbjorn and stop the Executioner. She absorbed the sum totality of the heroes on Earth to become as powerful as possible, beginning with Simon. Because of his energy state, though, Rogue physically absorbed Simon to access his ionic power. Once the Celestial, the Apocalypse Twins and the treacherous Kang were all defeated, Wanda helped Rogue release her absorbed powers back to their original owners… save Simon. To the horror of Wanda, Simon and Rogue, Wonder Man’s ionic essence remained trapped inside Rogue’s body. [Uncanny Avengers (1st series) #21-22]

With all that had happened to her recently, Wanda made the decision to reach out to her half-sister, Lorna Dane aka Polaris. Lorna had learned of her relationship to Magneto shortly before Wanda’s chaotic breakdown and, while Lorna and Pietro had spent time together on different incarnations of X-Factor, Wanda and Lorna had not. As a mutant, Lorna still harbored a grudge against Wanda as “the Decimation witch,” but she agreed to spend the day with Wanda. They attended a renaissance fair with Lorna’s X-Factor teammate Danger, and Lorna even inadvertently got Wanda drunk for the first time. Later at a bar, Wanda offered Lorna a place on the Avengers Unity Division so they could build their relationship. Lorna was flattered at the idea, but was reluctant to work for Havok in the Unity Division after their break-up. Wanda inadvertently made things worse when she mentioned Alex had sent Quicksilver to join X-Factor just to keep an eye on Lorna. Any talk about joining the Avengers fell apart after that. [All-New X-Factor #14]

After several weeks of recuperation, Rogue was released from stasis to try again to remove Simon from her system. Despite Wanda’s efforts, Simon’s ionic matrix remained trapped inside Rogue, leaving him inside her head and her powers unstable once more. Wanda reached out to Rogue in sympathy, and the two women bonded over their experiences. Wanda forgave Rogue for killing her in the aborted future and they came together, dedicated to help Simon and finally track down the Red Skull for what he did to Charles.

The Red Skull and his S-Men found them first, however, collecting them for the new mutant concentration camps he was building in the ashes of Genosha. Rogue and the Scarlet Witch were captured, along with Havok and Wanda’s father, Magneto. It was an uncomfortable reunion for them all. [Uncanny Avengers (1st series) #23-24, Magneto (2nd series) #10]

Magneto’s rage towards the Red Skull was all-consuming. The desecration of Xavier’s body and the recreation of Holocaust imagery infuriated him like nothing else. Wanda was terrified simply being near her father in this state, on top of her fears of being controlled by the Skull’s telepathy again and turned into a weapon. After seeing the way the Skull dehumanized and experimented on his other prisoners, the Scarlet Witch and Magneto stood together against the S-Men at first, until Magneto brutally murdered their foes before Wanda could stop him. The shocked Wanda allowed herself to be restrained by Magneto’s powers while he beat the Red Skull to death with his own hands. The merciless brutality of Magneto’s anger drove yet another wedge between father and daughter, and it proved to be for naught. Years earlier, the rage of Charles Xavier mixed with the mind of Magneto to create a new entity of unprecedented power. The Red Skull had successfully sought to recreate those circumstances with Magneto that day, and was reborn as the Red Onslaught. [Uncanny Avengers (1st series) #25]

The situation escalated dramatically as the Red Onslaught used his augmented telepathic might to usher in World War Hate, a wave of anger and hatred which threatened to engulf the world. The Scarlet Witch also remained one of his prime targets as he attempted to seize her mind and force Wanda into using her powers to bring about the Reich Eternal he desired. Rogue tried to drain the Red Onslaught’s power and discovered a small fragment of the real Charles Xavier still existed in his telepathic brain. She freed Wanda from the Skull’s control using her borrowed telepathy, and the two Avengers reunited against the Nazi’s threat.

Other Avengers, X-Men and heroes converged on Genosha to aid the Unity Squad against the Red Onslaught. Rogue shared what she had learned about the Red Skull and Xavier, prompting an idea between the Scarlet Witch and Doctor Strange. By casting chaos and order in a guided spell, the two mages could rotate the cosmic axis in the Red Onslaught, inverting him so that Professor X could take control. Their spell preparations were delayed by Stark Sentinels constructed by Iron Man under the Skull’s telepathic influence without his knowledge. The tide only turned once Magneto returned with a cadre of villains that the Sentinels had not been programmed to defeat. Strange fell in the conflict and Wanda was forced to work alongside her betrayer Doctor Doom, taking Stephen’s place in casting order.

The inverted Red Skull ceased his attack and fell into a coma, but the Inversion spell had larger consequences than expected. Everyone on Genosha (heroes and Magneto’s villains alike) had their basic nature inverted. Unity fell as the now-hostile Avengers and X-Men retreated to their own camps. The inverted Avengers seized power and trapped the majority of their clear-headed brethren in a Pym Particle subatomic cell. The Scarlet Witch abandoned her allies at this point to seek final revenge on Doom for manipulating her in the past. Doom and Valeria Richards assembled an ad hoc team of Avengers to oppose her, but Wanda was only barely slowed down by their intervention.

It was the Scarlet Witch’s father and brother who stood against her next in defense of Doom, knowing the real Wanda would never forgive herself for committing murder in this state. Wanda was in no condition to recognize this, however, and was infuriated at once more being betrayed by her blood. Declaring herself the Queen of Chaos, Wanda cast a hex to curse her bloodline, wishing agony on all those who shared her blood. Pietro indeed fell to the ground writhing in pain under Wanda’s hex. In a shocking turn of events for all present, though, Magneto was left completely unaffected by the bloodline curse. Wanda and Pietro quickly realized that what they thought they knew about their family was a lie. Before they could deal with the ramifications, Doctor Doom orchestrated the return of Doctor Voodoo and his spirit brother, Daniel, who possessed Wanda to end her rampage. Daniel then controlled Wanda into working with Doom to reverse the Inversion spell, restoring hero and villain alike to their senses. [Avengers & X-Men: Axis crossover]

When the dust settled, Wanda and Pietro had the time to consider what they had supposedly learned. They thought through who might be in a position to lie about their origins, and realized the High Evolutionary was the most likely culprit.

The twins returned to their birthplace on Mount Wundagore and discovered the Evolutionary had abandoned his citadel and recreated Counter-Earth, spinning around the sun at the opposite point of Earth’s orbit. The Evolutionary had gone mad, evolving new populations, killing them when they didn’t meet his definition of perfection, then evolving new ones. Rogue brought a new roster of the Avengers Unity Division after the twins, including a reluctant Vision who still had a grudge towards Wanda after what she did to him.

Wanda and Pietro confronted the High Evolutionary, who acknowledged the twins weren’t Magneto’s children and in fact weren’t even mutants. The Evolutionary claimed he had engineered the twins’ abilities in his experiments, but wasn’t satisfied with the results. He left them in the care of Django Maximoff under a genetic cloak that disguised their abilities as mutant in nature to hide his work. Wanda was unable to get more information out of the High Evolutionary during the conflict and, worse, one of his scientists experimented on Rogue and seemingly killed Simon, removing his consciousness from her psyche. Wanda grieved Simon and found herself unable to locate what became of his mind with her magic. The only silver lining of their mission was Vision pushing past his anger towards Wanda, and the two slowly began to rebuild their friendship. [Uncanny Avengers (2nd series) #1-5]