Coldheart

Coldheart (Modern)



The daughter of Poliʻahu, one of the four Hawaiian goddesses of snow and a Spanish engineer, Fairuza Black was born without the ability to produce heat. She spent much of her childhood in a specialized environment where she was constantly subjected to tests in hopes of curing her condition. It was during one of these tests, shortly after her twelfth birthday, that she was first allowed to go outside in a containment suit that her father had specially developed for her.

Chaperoned by her father, Fairuza was brought to a nearby park for a few hours to play with some of the other children in the area. However, none of the other kids in the park that day would go near her. In fact, most were so intimidated by the suit she had to wear that they resorted to calling her names and teasing her rather than socializing. Fairuza felt angry and utterly rejected. She begged her father to bring her home, where she spent the remainder of the day in bed listening to the merciless echo of the kids’ insults repeat in her head.

As she grew older, Fairuza grew colder, both in body and emotion. The condition that had originally transformed her began mutating further into something else. No longer did she just need extra warmth to survive, but her sense of touch started to dull and her skin took on a white pallor, hardening slightly and becoming colder as each year passed. As such, she felt even more distant and cut off from the world than before. Using her father’s many connections with AEON, Fairuza started to enhance her training beyond what basic schooling could teach her, hiring marksmen, thieves, martial arts masters, and weapons masters to teach her things that even most mercenaries didn’t know. When confronted about her extra-curricular activities by her father, Fairuza simply stated that it made her feel alive to learn these things. Her father suspected immediately that there was something more behind his daughter’s motivation, but he allowed her to continue unopposed while maintaining a closer watch over her.

By her eighteenth birthday, Fairuza’s contained environment filled the better part of a warehouse, allowing her the space to train in her various expertises. Having completed her high school education a few years prior, she continued to educate herself by pursuing degrees in the fields of engineering and cryogenics, focusing specifically on how they could be applied to her particular problem. Meanwhile, in her leisure time, she continued to hone and perfect her less scholarly skills within a special training room built for her inside her temperature controlled habitat. Things continued this way for a while until Fairuza’s father, having finally had enough of her, confronted her again about her unorthodox activities. She responded simply by touching him. Within a few quick seconds, his body seized as his blood and muscles froze solid, drained completely of all their heat. As she pulled her hand away, Fairuza gave him a gentle push and let the brittle corpse of her father fall to the ground, watching emotionlessly as he shattered apart across the metal floor. She managed to escape her containment room shortly thereafter with the prototype suit that her mother had made, leaving a messy trail of frozen carnage in her wake before she vanished.

Coldheart is kleptothermic, which allows her to drain heat from objects and living beings with a mere touch. The downside to this is that her power is always on, forcing her to use special cold-resistant gloves when interacting with anything that she doesn’t want to freeze. Her body is also in a constant state of needing heat so unless she drains something (or someone) every so often, she begins to grow weak as if plagued by a major illness. In addition to her ability to drain heat, Coldheart’s condition has also granted her hardened skin (which allows her to repel some attacks) and has made her bare skin almost impossible touch due to its extreme coldness. Her naturally low body temperature also allows Coldheart to be virtually invisible to the infrared spectrum. As an added bonus, her sensitivity to heat has developed to the point that she can now see heat signatures given off by objects and people, granting her the ability to seek out her prey even better.

Coldheart was created by Sketchpad Studio for use with Mutants and Masterminds RPG.

Generation(s)
Modern Generation