June Covington was a disturbed young woman even in childhood, running her father over with a tractor when she was only twelve. Attending a university in New York, a post-grad student with a research grant for her studies in biology, she was both ambitious and directionless. While working on a potential break-through in genetic medicine, she couldn't find the missing piece of her puzzle until meeting Edward Wynne, a biologist at the top of his field born with a slight birth defect. June figured if biology was fallible, then it could also perfected. That realization led to the creation of her Genetic Plug-in Technology, and she used herself as her first test subject. Initially she was content to fix all the random genetic accidents she'd suffered since conception, but then she experimented on others, resulting in their deaths; she claimed it was because their DNA was inferior. However, a year after meeting Wynne, she believed she was ready to show him her work and help him achieve perfection.
Wynne was appalled she would have brought him something so monstrous that he called campus security, requested an emergency meeting with the dean to get her expelled, and suggested she seek professional help. June merely saw his effrontery as insight that not everyone deserved perfection. Remaining in New York and working in an underground laboratory with funding from various black market sources and corrupt businessmen, she eventually closed her lab after distributing a genetic plug-in that turned poor people into food. Appearing at an expensive fundraising party where she saw Wynne again for the first time in years, she pretended to be apologetic and respectful to convince him to accompany her to check over her new, "nicer," work. He went to her lab, and June injected him with a genetic plug-in, specific to his DNA, paralyzing him and locking him inside to die, enacting her revenge. She was ultimately incarcerated in the Special Containment Center (SCC) underwater supermax penitentiary for the deaths of eighteen people at a prayer meeting when their heads exploded from overproducing cranial fluid, most likely from another genetic plug-in, and was in jail for at least two years when the criminally insane Green Goblin (Norman Osborn) was sent there.
June was one of the five most dangerous criminals housed in the SCC, but she seemed to coexist well with the others in her cell block, showing concern over reportedly deceased inmate Carl Rives and expressing anger when Officer Martin tortured the murderous Ai Apaec. When a mysterious Goblin cult liberated Osborn, they incited a prison riot after releasing all the inmates. She was attacked by another prisoner and had her body broken, but because of the enhancements she gave herself, June repaired her body and killed her attacker. Staying with Osborn until they escaped the SCC, she inserted herself back into society, getting a doctor’s position at the Raft maximum security prison where she treated Osborn. Developing an intimate relationship with Osborn, she adopted the Scarlet Witch's identity in Osborn's second incarnation of his Avengers (Osborn's team) in an attempt to disgrace the heroic team with the same name. Betrayed by Skaar, who only pretended to go along with Osborn’s plans until he could free Captain America (Steve Rogers), June was incarcerated at the Raft. Soon after, she became part of Luke Cage's Thunderbolts when the previous team was seemingly lost in the time stream.
