Codename: Chill
Character Name: Zoe Howard
Gender: F
Age: 16

Physical Description: Zoe is fairly short at 4'9", and skinny at a mere 85 lbs.  She has very pale skin, as she's incapable of tanning, has large, dark brown eyes, and hair that she dyes in various shades of black, blue, green and pink, generally in stripes.  She generally looks tired and world-weary, and is invariably found wearing combat boots, cargo pants, and many layers of heavy clothing even in the hottest of weather.  Despite this, her breath fogs, as if she was standing in the coldest of weather.  A very keen eye can notice a slight reddish aura around her, and clothing she wears is slightly red-shifted.  Her skin is notably cool to the touch at all times.

Personality: Zoe is tired, cynical and bitter.  She's confident in her own abilities in contexts aside from social behavior; she doesn't want to admit to weakness, and her first instinct is to keep people at a distance, but this, in turn, creates loneliness that she dislikes.  This is all amplified by her imperfect control of her own powers, and the forcible ending of her smoking habit.

Being surrounded by friendly people, however, is starting to wear down her defenses; she's discovering that it's easier to open up under some circumstances, especially to pretty girls.  But there are still many things she doesn't want to talk about.

Mutant Powers: Energy absorption.  Zoe can, to varying degrees, absorb virtually any form of energy, but the form of energy that she absorbs most easily is heat.  (She has the most trouble with kinetic energy, but can still use her power to survive blows and low-caliber gunfire to a certain degree.)  Her ability to absorb heat is impressive and continuous-- she can put out fires, make car engines stall out, or disable living creatures with a touch.  Her power doesn't have much range, however-- it's most effective within no more than an inch of her skin.  She appears to gain a certain amount of comfort or nourishment from the absorption of energy, but it's not dramatic enough to actually heal her.  She cannot shut off her absorption of heat; one side effect of this is that she, and her clothing and possessions, are effectively virtually invulnerable to heat and fire.

Note that while her power lets her absorb heat, in effect creating cold, she has no ability to create ice except by touching water and removing the heat from it.  She does not have any precision in her heat absorption, and cannot, for example, selectively freeze water in a specific area at this time.

Other Skills: Zoe has had a couple of year's training in self-defense, mostly in unarmed combat.  She's good at organization and efficiency, and a reasonably skilled amateur user of computers; as a hobby, she composes electronic music, but she normally doesn't play it for others.  She's a skilled skateboarder, as well.

Weaknesses: Zoe cannot fully control her absorption of energy, especially heat.  Her phone batteries die quickly, she cannot enjoy hot food, her skin is always cool to the touch, and nothing can stay ignited in close contact with her body, which means that she cannot light a match or lighter and cigarettes and vapes cannot stay lit while she holds them; she also has tremendous difficulty operating cooking or heating equipment.  More seriously, she is, ironically, extremely vulnerable to cold (and related energies, such as Darkforce) as they leach energy from her.

She's also going through nicotine withdrawal.  Sure, she can chew the gum, but it tends to go hard and cold in her mouth, and it is not the same thing at all, damnit!

Previous History:

Zoe was a normal child from a working-class urban background, raised by a single mother; she took a job clerking at a convenience store at a young age, and grew up-- or at least lost her idealism-- very quickly indeed.

The first sign of her mutant power, aside from migraines, was subtle-- her phone kept dying; the grill at her job kept letting the cheap nasty hot dogs grow cold.  But she quickly noticed that her smoking habit had to cease when her vapes stopped working, and beyond that, she always felt cold.  Soon there was no hiding how she had changed, and she was forced into hiding until she was taken in by the school... (See writing sample for expansion on this)