Quicksilver

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Background

Powers and Abilities

Quicksilver moves like greased lightning, and can run across entire continents. He can read books in seconds, learned to play the piano in less than 5 minutes, and can even vibrate so fast as to be invisible. He can move fast enough to direct strong air currents, such as when he creates cyclones by running in circles.

Post-Decimation powers

When the Scarlet Witch’s hex removed Pietro’s powers, he lost his superspeed and the physical adaptations his body had made to cope with high-speed movement. As a result he only had the capabilities of a normal man and was seriously outmatched even by 2 or 3 ordinary street thugs.

The Terrigen Mists returned Pietro’s power in a new form. Instead of moving at superspeed, he can travel forward in time by accelerating the molecules of his body (in DC Heroes terms, Time Travel). Quicksilver must concentrate to remain in the future and once he relaxes that concentration, he returns to the exact same time in the past that he traveled forward from.

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However, when Quicksilver returns to the past, he reappears at the location that he was in when he left the future, not in the location from which he originally traveled.

Pietro has used this aspect to mimic moving at superspeed by time traveling forward, moving a slight distance, then returning to the past, thus appearing to have moved from one spot to another faster than others could see.

The furthest precise time that Quicksilver has traveled forward is 14 days. He has traveled much further into the future than that, but the exact length of those jumps is unknown.

Tricks using the post-Decimation powers

A favorite trick that Pietro has learned is to travel repeatedly to the same point in the future, making it appear as though there are multiples of him (Split). He first used this to travel forward and help his future self steal some of the Terrigen Mists and Crystals.

He later used this in combat to engage opponents with multiple versions of himself by micro-jumping forward repeatedly to the same point in time. He has made up to three duplicates in this manner thus far.

Interestingly, when he only does this once, the future version of Pietro also has the benefit of remembering events from his earlier self’s perspective, but when triplication himself with the micro-jumps the other selves seem to be experiencing the event simultaneously.

This ability appears to be slowly worsening Quicksilver’s health, though some of his deterioration is undoubtedly due to mundane stress and fatigue as well. Nevertheless, he has lost significant weight and muscle tone since gaining his new powers.

However, this complication is not as significant as the ones usually suffered by mutants re-empowered by the the Mists and Quicksilver’s new powers appear to be permanent. This may be due to Quicksilver’s longer period of exposure. Furthermore, his initial empowerment took place in waters of the Terrigen Caves themselves, making for a much more intense initial exposure.

Terrigen mists

Further extended exposure to the Terrigen Mists caused Pietro to incorporate some of their traits into his own body. If he chooses, he can now restore the powers of mutants rendered powerless by his sister’s hex. He can only do this while in physical contact with the person whose powers he seeks to restore.

As with other mutants whose powers are restored by the Mists, the powers come back in somewhat altered form,invariably have harmful and potentially life-threatening complications, and eventually fade away.

Examples of these complications include Callisto’s enhanced senses being so heightened that the painful flood of sensations rendered her comatose and Unus’s force field becoming so strong that it kept oxygen from getting to him.

History

Pietro Maximoff is the son of Magneto, mutant Master of Magnetism, and his former wife, a Romani named Magda. Prior to Pietro’s birth, Magda fled Magneto, terrified by the recent manifestation of his bizarre powers and his newly adopted doctrine of world domination. Seeking refuge, Magda came upon the scientific citadel of Wundagore in the Balkan Mountains of Transia.

She was taken in by Bova, a humanoid cow created by the master geneticist known as the High Evolutionary. Magda gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl, and named them Wanda and Pietro. Still afraid her estranged husband might hunt them down them, she walked into the frozen mountain wilderness to perish.

Bova presented the twins to the High Evolutionary, who agreed to find them human foster parents. He chose Django and Marya Maximoff, a Romani couple camped nearby, who had lost their own twins. The Maximoffs accepted the gift and cared for the children as if they were their own.

As adolescents, Wanda and Pietro discovered they possessed unusual superhuman abilities. Wanda could cause strange phenomenon to occur simply by waving her hands, and Pietro was able to move faster than the blink of an eye.

When Django stole food to feed his starving family, enraged villagers attacked the Romani camp. Using his phenomenal speed, Pietro took flight with his sister. The circumstances of the youngsters’ separation from their family were so traumatic that not until well into adulthood could they remember anything but the barest details of their early existence.

For the next few years, Wanda and Pietro wandered central Europe, living off the land.

Mutant destiny

While visiting a small village, Wanda accidentally caused a house to burst into flame with her then-uncontrollable hex-casting abilities. Superstitious townspeople took up arms against the young mutant, mistaking her for a witch. Despite Pietro’s attempts to defend his sister, the siblings soon were overpowered.

They were about to be killed when Magneto came to their rescue. The genetic terrorist pressed them into service in his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, costumed them, and rechristened them the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver.

For months, Wanda and Pietro served their new master out of a sense of obligation — and for fear of reprisal. As members of the Brotherhood, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch aided Magneto in his terrorist campaigns against humanity and helped him combat the idealistic team of mutant heroes known as the X-Men.

Magneto did not realize Wanda and Pietro were his children, nor did they know he was their father.

Avengers assemble !

When the alien entity known as the Stranger stamped out the Brotherhood, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch petitioned for membership in the Avengers, Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. They were inducted — along with Hawkeye, arrow-slinging ex-con — to replace the team’s charter members, who wished to take leaves of absence.

However, humanity’s hatred and fear of mutants still disturbed Quicksilver. He briefly rejoined Magneto, compelling his sister to follow. Ultimately, the siblings confronted the Master of Magnetism. Combining their abilities, Wanda and Pietro helped the Avengers and X-Men defeat their former savior.

After rejoining the Avengers, Quicksilver was seriously injured while battling a pack of mutant-hunting Sentinel androids. He was rescued by Crystal — a member of the royal family of the Inhumans, a genetic offshoot of mankind. The pair became romantically involved and married following a brief courtship.

Not long after the birth of their first child, Luna, Quicksilver discovered the truth regarding his parentage. Magneto had stumbled upon Bova, and learned from her that Wanda and Pietro were his children.

Revelation

Magneto confronted Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch with this revelation, hoping to sway them to rejoin his crusade against humanity. Unable to accept that he had changed his ways, Quicksilver denounced Magneto for his callous treatment of them when they were members of his Brotherhood.

Although the mutant speedster chose to remain with his wife in the Inhumans’ domain, he began to neglect her. This led Crystal to become involved with another man. Learning of her infidelity, Quicksilver refused to forgive her. For a time, Quicksilver became somewhat unhinged and moved to Hungary.

Crystal took Luna to Earth and joined the Avengers, while Quicksilver connected with the team’s West Coast branch. Shortly thereafter, Pietro became a special operative of the U.S. government as a member of its new mutant task force, X-Factor.

When Quicksilver and Crystal successfully reconciled, Pietro left X-Factor and rejoined the Avengers. However, the struggling couple’s happiness came to an abrupt end when Crystal seemingly perished in the team’s battle against sentient psionic  menace known as Onslaught.

In reality, a whole host of Earth’s greatest heroes had been transported to an alternate reality.

From Wundagore to Genosha

During Crystal’s absence, the High Evolutionary recruited Quicksilver to lead a small faction of his Knights of Wundagore – animals the geneticist had endowed with intelligence and humanoid forms. For a time, Pietro directed the Knights in battles against injustice. Quicksilver and Crystal were reunited when the missing heroes finally returned to their native Earth.

After Magneto gained control of the island nation of Genosha off the coast of South Africa, Quicksilver returned to his father’s side. But this was only to acquire a better vantage point from which monitor his activities.

At first forced to cope with civil war and the effects of the lethal Legacy Virus, Magneto soon gained the might of a unified nation when a cure for the mutant plague was released into the atmosphere.

At the eleventh hour, Quicksilver managed to escape his father’s empire to warn the X-Men of the Master of Magnetism’s impending attack against humanity. Though the world continues to teeter on the brink of genetic war, Pietro has chosen to fight by his sister’s side once again as a member of the Avengers.

Global sorcery

When his sister Wanda was but into a come after having a mental breakdown and inadvertently using her powers to harm or kill numerous Avengers, Pietro was among the leading members of the Avengers and X-Men who met to discuss how to handle the situation. Fearing that the assembled group might harm his sister, Pietro convinced her to use her abilities to remake the world.

In this altered reality, mutants were the dominant political force across the world. Magneto was the most powerful of those leaders, with Wanda and Pietro serving at his side. Flaws in this restructured reality (including a mutant who restored others’ memories of the original unaltered world) eventually led to its collapse.

Wanda brought it to an end by wishing for “No more mutants.” As a result of Wanda’s final hex, the world returned to its original state but 98% of the currently existing mutant lost their powers. Pietro was among those mutants and fell into a suicidal depression due to everything that had happened and his prominent role in those events.

His former wife Crystal of the Inhumans brought Pietro back to the Inhuman city of Attilan. After the Inhumans’ Royal Family refused to let Pietro expose himself to the Terrigen Mists that gave the Inhumans their powers, he snuck into the Terrigen Cave and did it himself.

Terrigen power

The Terrigen Mists gave Pietro new powers. Instead of moving at superspeed, he could now travel through time, though it had cumulatively deleterious effects on him. Convinced he could use the Mists to return other mutants’ powers, Pietro stole a canister of the Terrigen Mists and some of the Crystals and went to Genosha.

He restored the powers of several other mutants with the Mists. Yet as with Pietro the powers were similar though not exactly the same as their original abilities but also had serious defects. These defects actually crippled or killed some of the mutants who had been exposed to the Mists. The effects of the Mists eventually faded for all exposed.

As a result of the complications arising from the use of the Mists and a brutal three-way confrontation between the remaining Genoshans, the Inhumans, and the US government (which stole Pietro’s supply of crystals, precipitating a conflict between the US and the Inhumans), Pietro gave up his original plan to restore the world’s mutants with the Mists.

Powers broker

He fled the scene and instead immersed himself in his remaining supply of the Mists for an extended period, then traveled into the future to see the results of his actions.

He was horrified by the chaos that was coming, but did not believe he could change it. Instead, Pietro embraced the future and began openly using yet another ability he had gained from the long-term exposure to the Mists. His touch could now restore mutants’ powers in the same manner that exposure to the Terrigen Mists did.

Pietro has now opened a clinic of sorts where he claims he can restore mutants’ powers without side-effects. When he does so and the usual complications arise, he blames the “cured” mutants for being unworthy of the gift.

Description

For some reason two locks on his brow rise up in the air like if they were antennas.

He generally wears a simple skintight bodysuit ; his classic costume is light blue with a white lightning bolt on the chest, and white gloves and boots. Earlier he wore a more greenish version of it.

Since gaining his time travel powers, Pietro’s physical condition has visibly worsened due to various stresses. He now looks somewhat emaciated. When using his ability to negate Wanda’s hex on mutants, small Terrigen Crystals protrude from Quicksilver’s hands and his eyes glow with the same electric blue color as the Crystals themselves.

Personality

Quicksilver is a jerk, but an heroic jerk with strong willpower. His problem is that he’s always sped up, so people around him look unbearably slow, stupid and clumsy. As he once said, his entire life is like waiting in line at an ATM behind a little old lady who’s afraid of the machine, doesn’t know how to use it and takes forever to try to get $5.

Quicksilver does all kinds of things to alleviate this aggravation and boredom, coming across as somewhat hyperactive and sometimes doing stupid things out of arrogance and irritation.

He comes across as arrogant, overbearing and full of contempt. But when he likes the people around him this quickly mutates into a biting, but funny, wit. He’s also very protective of women, and is your typical Mediterranean when it comes to his sister.

The Marvel SAGA roster book described Pietro as “quick-tempered, impatient, unforgiving of slights, quick to take offense, arrogant, refuses to show weaknesses, extremely protective of family, and unlikely to use contractions”. That’s a good description.

Post-Decimation

Pietro’s already fragile sanity took serious blows during the Decimation and following events. He was suicidal after the House of M reality collapsed and he found himself among the many mutants who had lost their powers.

He became obsessed with restoring the damage he had done, to the point of continuing to suggest the Terrigen Mists to mutants as a way to restore their powers even when confronted with the ghastly reality of the Mists’ side-effects.

Upon seeing the horrific future that his actions had wrought, Pietro seemingly snapped and decided that since he could not prevent that future he would embrace it.

When the mutants he empowers suffer the problems typically associated thus far with Terrigen Mist use, Pietro has blamed the mutants themselves as being the cause, punished for not having sufficient strength of character. It is unknown if Pietro truly believes this or if he is consciously lying to deflect blame from himself.

Regardless, Quicksilver has much more volatile temper now and is developing a sort of Messiah complex. His Motivation vacilates between Unwanted Power and Psychopath. Sometimes he feels trapped by his new powers and other times he seems dedicated to bringing about the horrible future he has foreseen.

Quotes

“Ah, the curse of being so damn versatile…”

DC Universe History

There was a Golden Age Quality character named Quicksilver in the DCU, who was retconed has having been an identity of Max Mercury. But the similarities are thin, same name and superspeed. However, it’s not impossible that Pietro is Max’s son who was given up for adoption (before his powers manifested, naturally), and became a villain (at least temporarily).

Though Pietro would know nothing of this, Max would blame himself for Pietro’s problems, but be unable to get through to the kid, which would set him on the path of mentoring the other speedsters and explain a part of his attitude toward the current, post-Kid Flash generation.

Pietro would have reformed in time to have associated with Infinity, Inc. for a few months (though never becoming a member). He would have ended up joining the Detroit League not long before Crisis. During that time, Pietro met Zatanna, and the two had a brief spotlight adventure fighting the Construct where Mantis (as “Willow”) claimed that Pietro was Zatara’s son.

Though this proved to be false, it set Pietro on the long road to eventually finding his true father, Max.

Their reunion was violent and didn’t go well, Quicksilver II still not embracing Max’s principles. He would have recently joined the Ultramarines.

By Sébastien Andrivet with Roy Cowan and Capita_Senyera.

Helper(s): Marvel site , Marvel SAGA roster book, Nick Yankovec, Jay Myers, Gareth Lewis, Jackson, Paul Ewande, the Angel, the marveldirectory.com site , Ethan Roe, John Colagioia (DC History), Roy Cowan. Sketch by Matthew Clark from his blog .

Source of Character: Numerous Marvel comics.