Character Sheet
Indries Moomji
Category : Comic Books
Subcategory : Marvel universe
Type : Other
Game System : DC Heroes (Blood of Heroes S.E.)
Indries Moomji v1.1
Source of Character: Marvel Universe
Helper(s): Darci, Peter Piispanen, Pufnstuff, Woodrow Hill
Reasons: Whilst the breaking of Tony Stark by Obadiah Stane is a well-known episode, many forget that it was Ms. Moomji who did about 75% of the work !
Game Stuff
Indries Moomji
(In character) "I shan't, I promise. By the way, I am Indries Moomji. I am in your country to study technology, I was touring your plant -- and quite impressive it is -- when the... accident occurred. America is not dull, is it ?"
Indries (In character) "You must think I am terribly forward and brazen... a horrible
woman..."
Tony Stark: "No. No, I don't."
(In character) "Hello, Iron Man. It is Iron Man, is it not ? I have sometimes trouble with names. And my English is not perfection yet. You have knowledge of Tony Stark ? He is not hurt ?"
"Where is your wit, Tony ? Your style ? Your taste ? In your bank account, perhaps. Certainly no place else. What are you, Tony Stark ? A glossy shell ! A preening poseur who hides his inadequacy behind a credit card sophistication. A petulant child with a minor talent for electronic tinkering and a quivering ego... and that is all. I was amused by you. I enjoyed taking gifts from you and watching you pant after me like a puppy dog. But love you ? It is astonishing even you can be so stupid !"
Indries Moomji
| Dex: 03 | Str: 02 | Bod: 04 | Motivation: Mercenary |
| Int: 05 | Wil: 05 | Min: 04 | Occupation: Spy |
| Inf: 05 | Aur: 05 | Spi: 04 | Resources {or Wealth}: 005 |
| Init: 013 | HP: 015 |
Advantages: Attractive, Connoisseur, Expertise (Psychology of influence, Spotting and identifying emotions), Gift of Gab, Languages (unrevealed)
Connections: Sisterhood of Ishtar (High)
Drawbacks: Creepy Appearance (Stunningly beautiful), Misc.: her Creepy Appearance does not carry a bonus to Intimidation (barring some very specific cases)
Hypotheticals
For some reason there was a fair bit of speculative commentary about this character. Her name sounds
somewhat Persian ; if she is indeed from Iran, it is entirely possible that the Daughters of Ishtar were
originally a Communist organisation battling the regime of the Shah, which went international and allied
itself with Chinese and North Korean agents after the revolution and eventually becoming a mercenary
outfit.
Possible languages for Ms. Moomji include Modern Standard Arabic, Farsi, Mandarin Chinese, and perhaps some Slavic and Romance languages, plus Classical Arabic, though nothing was actually demonstrated.
Background
Real name: "Indries Moomji" was likely an alias for the Stark mission
Marital Status: Unknown
Known Relatives: None
Group affiliation: Sisterhood of Ishtar
Base Of Operations: An underground desert base in the American Southwest
Height: 5'6" Weight: 120 lbs
Eyes: Dark blue-green Hair: Black
Powers and Abilities
Ms. Moomji has been trained from early childhood to be alluring, and to be the perfect object of any heterosexual man's dreams. Her face and body have been altered using world-class plastic surgery, making her stunningly beautiful. In fact her beauty is almost unreal, like a talented glamour shot of a top model with the usual Photoshop enhancements - but in the flesh.
Her perfect body generates synthetic allure-enhancing pheromones, and she has received training from the finest psychologists and acting instructors. Her skill at seduction and manipulation of men is incredible ; in fact, faced with the results, James Rhodes assumed it must have been some kind of super-powered mesmerism or even outright magic spells. The pheromones are chiefly there to speed things up and allow some margin of error ; being shielded from scents did not seem to provide any quantifiable protection against her charms.
Indries works by vamping her target then analysing and leveraging weaknesses and character flaws (such as Stark's alcoholism). She cannot, in the usual time frame, alter a personality - but she usually does not need to anyway, as pushing a few emotional buttons is often quite sufficient.
Sisters of Ishtar seem to also have a degree of self-defense training and to be physically tougher than they look - Indries deliberately suffered a broken arm and several broken ribs, plus a mild concussion and some internal haemorrhaging, in her initial approach of Tony Stark. Her cover also implied some level of technological skill, sufficient to pass for some kind of engineering student even when speaking with Tony Stark, and it is almost certain that she speaks one or more languages beside English.
History:
The Sisterhood of Ishtar (named after the ancient Middle Eastern goddess of love and war) is an elite freelance, high-tech espionage organisation specialising in the seduction of male targets ; they are generally hired for intelligence work, manipulation, blackmail, emotional destruction, etc. Only one base is known, in the American Southwest - which boasted considerable automated defences, a male manager who seemed to be of Chinese or Korean descent, and half a dozen of Sisters. It may very well be the only base of the organisation.
During his complex take-over of Stark International, Obadiah Stane hired whom I assume was the Sisterhood's best agent - Indries Moomji. One of Stane's plans employed mind control helmets and advanced explosives to create chaos at Stark International ; while Iron Man was handling this crisis, Indries deliberately drove her car under a heavy collapsing arch, which crushed the car and resulted in non-trivial wounds for her (I would assume the arch had been prepared by a demolition specialist to fall just right on the prepositioned car). Iron Man got her out of her wrecked car and flew her to the hospital ; struck by her incredible beauty and feeling guilty that she had been hurt on his premises, Stark started visiting her at the hospital and kept sending her flowers.
For this mission, Indries's cover was that she was some sort of engineering student coming from an unclear country to study American technology ; she had an impossible to place but real damn sexy accent, and a weird and intriguing touch with English grammar, obviously stemming from having formally studied but not practised the language. Later evidence points out that she was acting - her English is actually quite fluent and she can have any accent she practices.
Beyond her dazzling beauty, she used a mix of humour, courage (as she kept minimising the importance of her wounds, and came to a date with a broken arm still in plaster and a crutch as if it were nothing), exoticness and interest in technology that had Stark go gaga over her within minutes.
As Stark/Iron Man started fighting against Stane's Chessmen operatives, he and Indries started dating. She rapidly determined that he was an alcoholic, and eventually decided that the best way to break him as per Stane's instruction was to drive him back crawling into the bottle. Whilst waiting for the kill order, she brazenly seduced Stark during their dates, and even convinced Rhodes to let her aboard Stark's private jet when they flew to Scotland as part of the conflict with the Chessmen.
As she grew ever closer to Stark in record time, she started subtly arranging for Stark to feel that his inability to drink alcohol made him weak and unmanly, while she obviously was a connoisseur of expensive liquor. Moomji manipulated events and paid extras to have Stark repeatedly made look stupid and feeble for not tolerating smells or places associated with alcohol.
Likely acting on intelligence provided by Moomji, Stane arranged further incidents and failures around Stark to make him feel that the whole world was scheming against him and that fate hated him. Buffeted by endless minor crises and the sleep deprivation it induced, Stark also found himself unable to reach Indries for a few days due to telecom issues. This led to a sense of almost physical withdrawal, which he felt forced to compensate for by finding extra strength and endurance in a bottle of unblended scotch whiskey. Stark managed to throw the bottle away without opening it, though, and didn't actually relapse.
The destruction of Tony Stark
At that point, Stark was clearly headed for a nervous breakdown. As he was abroad, Moomji arranged to become reachable over the phone again, smoothly providing loving admiration and emotional support which reenergised Stark - but also made him emotionally dependent on her to stave off his breakdown. As Stark was barely holding himself together and found himself in dire need of Moomji's company lest he falls apart, she got her order from Stane and verbally torn him apart, cruelly rejecting him and breaking him. Broken and devastated, Tony Stark started drinking heavily for several days to dull the pain, entering a confused alcoholic haze. Moomji then headed back to Stane's HQ, watching the master manipulator engineer the final fall of the man she had turned into a pitiful, barely coherent, alcohol-soaked wreck.
As she watched from afar, James Rhodes started becoming Iron Man as Stark rejected all of his friends and worked on destroying himself with liquor. The industrialist holed up in a hotel suite and ended up with a woman strongly encouraging him to drink non-stop - quite possibly another Sister of Ishtar, or a Stane operative. Meanwhile, Stane legally took over Stark International - at that point the interim CEO, Yvette Avril (the former head of SI in France), could not hope to fight the takeover, which was already far too advanced by the time she was promoted.
Stane told Iron Man (James Rhodes) that Indries had been captured by an organisation called the Sisterhood of Ishtar, and that if he could rescue her she might save Stark. Though still inexperienced, Rhodes managed to survive the defences of the Sisterhood and grab Indries. As she flew her back to New York, she explained to him that she was actually a mercenary working for Stane, and that she had no special way to reverse Stark's descent into alcoholism - he was already a drunk before he met her, and she simply used that fact. Though he was making a big show of not being influenced by Moomji's charm and beauty, Rhodes still let her walk away freely after they landed, which amused her.
Indries Moomji has not been seen since that landmark operation.
Description:
See illustration. Indries's ethnicity is hard to pin down - she has white skin and seems vaguely Slavic (South-Eastern Europe, maybe) or a fair-skinned Persian, but her altered face and body draw attractive features from some Asian ethnicities, American canons, etc.
Personality
Whatever you pay for. She appears to be a very professional mercenary, but she is normally acting a specific role when she appears in a story. We have very little idea of what her actual personality is like.
It is possible that she was not playing a role when Rhodey barged in to grab her at the Sisterhood's base, but given that she pressed all kinds of button and manipulated him like a chump, her behaviour was probably mission-oriented again. The scene where she breaks character then shatters Stark was also obviously scripted - I suspect that Stane personally wrote her emotional haymaker (the one in the quotes).
DC Universe History:
No problem here. The Sisterhood would have been hired a few times by Amanda Waller, to devastating effect. They likely still are in her contacts list, and may also have worked for the UN's Checkmate organisation.
