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Roulette
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Roulette is the sobriquet of Jenny Stavros, a pupil of Emma Frost and member of her Hellions. At present, she is the only Hellion known to have survived the attack on the Massachusetts Academy.
Background
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Jennifer Stavros was born the youngest of six children to a Greek-American family in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Her mother died when she was a baby, and her father -- a casino blackjack dealer -- worked full-time and never really had enough energy for all six of his kids. Jenny, as the youngest, tended to get ignored the most. When she was thirteen years old she ran away from home and joined a street gang, using her slowly manifesting mutant powers to unconsciously influence events in the group's favor.
Jenny found her mere presence helped her fellow gangbangers shoot straighter, run faster, evade the cops more easily, find more affluent people to mug... as her probability alteration powers grew stronger, it became clear to her that this wasn't a simple knack but rather a developing mutant ability, and her sudden manifestation one day of an energy disc of pure psionic force indicated to her that her hunch had been correct; she started calling these projections her 'Wheels of Fortune'. She was arrested soon afterward when she accidentally made the -wrong- kind of disc -- a black 'bad luck' disc -- and dropped it at her own feet during a chase with the police. She was about to be jailed pending trial after the cops found many small crimes on her record. That's when Emma Frost walked into her life.
Emma had found Jenny with a special computer she had invented, called the Mutatis, that was essentially a smaller-scale version of Xavier's Cerebro. She told Jenny what the teenager had already surmised -- that she was special, a mutant, and that mastering her powers would require a good teacher -- and Jenny quickly took Emma's hand, preferring boarding school to jail.
Over the ensuing years Jenny served as 'Roulette', a member of Emma Frost's team of Hellions, doing work for the Hellfire Club in between training sessions and occasionally coming to blows with Xavier's students or the Teen Titans. She was having the time of her life, until one day Sebastian Shaw, enraged with Emma, arranged for some Sentinel robots to blow the Massachusetts Academy to smithereens. One of Jenny's teammates, a precognitive, foresaw the school's destruction in her cards, and warned Jenny that they were all about to die. Not one to go down without a fight, Jenny spent the next hour creating the largest Wheel of Fortune she'd ever made in her life. She dropped it in the common room, hoping her good luck power would save not only herself, but all the others in the building.
Somehow, against all odds, Jenny survived the Sentinel attack. She was thrown by an explosion through a first floor window, and landed safely -- if stunned -- in the grass outside. Groggy and in something of a haze, she wandered for town when she saw no other survivors; her classmates had been seemingly vaporized, unless they too had somehow managed to escape. Now, she's trying to find Emma and put the pieces of her life back together. She figures Xavier's is probably the first place to look.
PersonalityEdit
Jenny Stavros is a good example of a person who grows up with nothing and lets the desire, the urge, the -need- to never be poor again pretty much rule their entire life. She ran away from home when she was thirteen, and life on the streets for the next few years enabled her to pick up quick cash via thievery and mugging while also being as mean and tough as she wanted to be. After a while wearing the mask of the Mean Girl, she found she couldn't really take it off.
Emma Frost showed Jenny that it's okay to take what you want, to be as cruel as you want to be. She took to Emma's teaching more fervently than most of her fellow students, and as a result she's very manipulative and prone to protecting herself emotionally with a veneer of dry humor and outright lies.
Still, there's potential for heroism somewhere in her heart. She's not a bad person so much as a person who grew up in bad circumstances, and all of the defense mechanisms she built up to overcome those circumstances turned out to be negative ones. Maybe someday she'll come around. For now, though, she's greedy, vain, and not one to care too much about the feelings of others.
