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For the last week or so I've just been popping out characters almost constantly, counting individuals I'm up to eight and they're all for Zero Academy, so Joe's been a little pissy, as such, GO AWAY JOE.

..Name: Rachel Grayson
..Age: 14

..A Bit About Me:
Rachel was born and raised in New York, father a banker, mother a moderately successful fashion designer slash retired lawyer, both of them were older than most parents, and honestly they weren't very good parents. Luckily they paid for her to go to a school filled with very good teachers, and she was mostly raised by them. One day it was Take Your Daughter to Work day, now, being a banker her dad couldn't really afford to baby sit a kid all day, and most of his work was really boring so instead she would just come by for lunch and he'd show her stuff then. About a minute after she arrived the bank got robbed, and not just robbed, robbed by a gang of lesser villains, they weren't particularly strong or skilled but they had dangerous abilities and didn't know how to use them. Then the 'heroes' showed up. By the end of it most of the building was leveled and most of the surrounding buildings were in bad shape. Despite that there were only two casualties, one of the villains, impaled on a hero, and Rachel, she and her father had been crushed under debris but his body was stronger, made it out with a couple dozen broke bones and a severe concussion. She had technically died of suffocation but there was enough injury that she would have died before the rescue workers got there anyways.

About four hours later, which happened to be twelve minutes before her scheduled autopsy, Rachel woke up, naked and cold on a metal table in a refrigerated box with a tag on her toe. She was only stuck in there till the coroner came to pick her up, but he was pretty damn freaked out too. Once everybody calmed down and the proper authorities were called they went to inform the family. It ended badly. With her husband in a medical coma and her child supposedly (and technically) dead Mrs. Grayson was already in pieces, then the doctors told her about Rachel, she seemed to improve at the news but when they actually brought Rachel in she just went nuts, ended up almost strangling herself with an IV tube. She didn't really recover.

A few days later when her dad woke up it was decided that Rachel couldn't stay with him in his condition, and with her mother now in the psych ward there weren't many other options. "We all need to do what we can right now, if we use our energy trying to do things we can't it'll just hurt us more. I can't help you right now, those people can, and I can help your mother. If we all work hard we can put this family back in one piece. You know I love you, I'll always love you, but I can't help you..." her dad said, Soon a pair of teachers from Zero came to pick her up.

They've seen each other in the five years since, but he's still wheelchair bound and Mrs. Grayson is still having too frequent bouts of suicidal insanity, seeing Rachel only makes things worse so she stopped visiting. Her life goal is to graduate in high standing and get a good deal with the government so she can take care of her father, maybe even pay for better treatments.

Because of the nature of her existence she's been placed in a lot of classes relating the arcane, magics of various types, and anything else that might be helpful in understanding herself and how to make use of and take care of her state.

..I Look Like:
Little noticed fact of the undead, they're dead. As such they do not grow, they do not age, they don't really heal like normal but it gets done. Rachel was nine when she died, so she looks like a nine year old. Another little fact, to a body being alive takes a lot of energy, and it consumes the highest levels of that energy at an extraordinary pace, so for an undead to maintain their body at life-like levels would require them to consume a great deal of life-energy very often. Roughly two living humans per day, and they'd have to consume the humans' soul completely, preventing the important bits from passing back into the life/death cycle, effectively killing them completely, forever.

What all that means is that Rachel is rather obviously dead, as she's not a horrible cold blooded murderer. She is cold blooded though. Her skin is generally a light grayish blue shade; it becomes darker when she's low on energy. It also means that she's still physically nine, and barring unforeseen complications will remain nine for the remainder of her death. Though it doesn't 'heal', her body rebuilds itself out of raw life-energy, so she doesn't have any scars, bruises, sometimes they stitch her together for a while when things get bad, like a severed arm, but in general, other than being a weird shade, she looks whole.

Her hair is mostly black with random stripes of white; she keeps it fairly long and takes great care of it, so it's real swooshy. She usually dresses in long clothing that covers her skin, purple and dark blue tones accented with brighter stripes or pins, sometimes fingerless gloves. Her pants are always an extensive patchwork of mismatched fabrics, from the odd square of leather to puzzle pieces of different colored denim. As her body, not going through the normal processes of being alive, produces very little heat but can still feel the cold, her clothes are all very thick, sometimes as many as three layers of denim over something fluffy, which makes for stiff cloth that has to be very baggy for her to move effectively in it. A welcome side effect is that all the layers make her look bigger, and older than her body does, which makes people take her just the tiniest bit more seriously.

..Anything Else?:
On it's own Rachel's body requires only the sustenance to repair any damage it incurs (and a very small amount to fight off rot), were she to abstain from using her other powers she would only need to consume a few times a year, as she did(n't) for the first year, before the other powers emerged. Additionally, she doesn't eat food, and she doesn't really 'eat', she absorbs the life energy of other creatures for fuel, then that energy is used to rebuilt her body and power her more active abilities. That said, she doesn't eat people's souls, she could, but that'd be evil, so she sticks to small animals, sometimes insects but they have so little life energy it's not worth it unless there's a swarm, additionally, life energy has nothing at all to do with the state of one's body, so dying animals are just as good.

One of the effects of being dead is that a good number of the really intricate cells stop working, or don't work nearly as well. the body expends extra resources to maintain the vital ones like the receptors of the eye or the nerve endings in the hands, the structures of the ear, and of course the brain, but most of the other sense cells sit in a state of disrepair, so she can't smell particularly well, or taste much at all most of the time, especially when she's low on energy.

In general her studies are progressing slowly, there have been very few spontaneous undead recorded throughout history and man-made ones are just mindless zombies, so the teachers force her to be annoyingly careful, were she to run out of life energy she would simply be dead, again. For good. But also there are so many aspects to her powers to master that all the work she does basically averages out to little gain.

Rachel is not infectious.

..Power(s):
Aside from being undead and the aforementioned ability to speed up her reconstruction, Rachel has a well-diversified set of abilities, most of which stem from her odd connection to the dead side of magic. For starters, she can see ghosts, which spans everything from haunting spirits to souls on vacation, Halloween gets particularly fun. She can grant people without strong arcane resistance the ability to see them as well, so long as they stay close. To a limited degree she is able to control other dead bodies, that one is particularly draining, also it doesn't come up very often with the general lack of dead things at Zero. An extension of that is that she can control any part of her body even once it has been severed. Lately she's been learning how to summon 'familiars', kinda blobby demony minion things, they're their own creature so she only has to exert energy to create them and control them, and she's not so good at the later part.

Beyond her undead capacity she's also got a fairly weak grasp of some generic energy ball/beam/wall techniques, she's not at all talented at the generic arcane stuff and the other powers take up a lot of her training time.

..Power Type: Magical
..Training Level: 1

Ah. THis is why you asked how I felt about zombies.

Question: Why is some of her hair white but not other parts?

How does a school, founded on philosophies of heroes, justify letting a creature feed on other human beings for her own survival?

Other than that, nothing much. It all makes sense.

Okay. That makes more sense.

Are the small animals chihuahuas please tell me they're chihuahuas

One of the things I've been trying to do with all these characters I've made is take common superhero architypes, and make them in a way that I have never seen, arguing at the borders to make them function differently. Rachel is a fairly standard necromancer but being dead herself is a bit unusual and being 14(9) years old, I've never seen that. Add to it the personality of such a young girl and she will be unlike most if not all others.

A few characters back I decided to make a juggernaut. Unstoppable, indestructible. When you think about a character you usually end up with some armor clad strong man with an iron will and usually a mind of mush. One of the standard dogs of war. I don't like that, plus it's not much of a power, ooo, my flesh is bulletproof, ooo, I can jump forever and bunch the bones out of your head with my pinky finger.

Somewhere I half remembered an old character I had been working on, the basic concept is that they are static within the universe, they can move themselves but other things cannot move them. And thus:

Name: April Felston
Age: 16
A Bit About Me:
Once upon a time April got hit by a truck, we'll get back to that; April was born a perfectly average girl to a perfectly average father and a perfectly average mother, they raised her in a perfectly average neighborhood and she went to a perfectly average school, where she had average friends and got average B+s, except in History where she was queen. She could correct the teachers. So then she got to high school and it was all very average until the boy she liked from afar asked her to one of those dances she was always making fun of people for obsessing over. Funny things happen to girls when you invite them to dances. Anyways, that all seemed to go over well, no evil tricks or hyperbitchery. There was just a bit of beer, and maybe some wine, perhaps a shot of vodka, nothing much I assure you. At about 3am April and Duncan (the guy) were walking home, thoroughly wasted when one of them had the greatest idea ever, they should run through the forest. And so they did.

At the other end of the forest there was a highway, but it was so dark and empty and they were so drunk it just seemed like a field. So they were dancing in the field when some headlights crested a hill in the distance. "It's a monster!" Duncan said, "We have to catch it!" April said, so they went and hid in the ditch. Just before the truck passed they both jumped out intending to tackle it, Duncan slipped and broke his nose on the asphalt but April stepped true. Her timing was a bit off though, when she went to tackle it she missed the back tire of the tractor and went under the trailer. She was still in mid air when the trailer's wheels came around. First they tried to go over her, but she was too high and they were going too fast, so they tried to go through her, and lost. Between the concussion and the booze Duncan barely remembered who he was let alone the wreck. Nothing about a semi is designed for a crash wherein the entire rear axle truck is sheared off, it just doesn't happen. The tractor was flung into the forest, the driver had died by time the next car drove by two hours later. The authorities ran into trouble from the moment they tried to drive April to the station, the cruiser just wouldn't move, when the officer floored it the wheels just spun. After a few other problems like April tearing off a pair of handcuffs by accident they called the government who called Zero. It was damn lucky they lived less than a day's walk from one of the academies.

I Look Like: A pure and obvious geek April dresses in the finest shades of don't-give-a-damn, usually completely average jeans, a geek t shirt and a hoody or jacket adorned with various fandom patches. Neck length dirty blond hair, secured under one of her many fancy hats, or of course, the hood. If you look closely she's always wearing at least one side of a set of headphones, usually earbuds of some so it's not completely obvious but when she's feeling problematic there are a few large models in her closet. Despite all that most people find her eyes to be her most striking feature, a brilliant bright green on the outside, fringed in the middle by vibrant red stabbing out from her pupil; The red is thin but hard to miss.

Anything Else?:
Power(s): April is uneffectable, not completely of course, she still feels heat and gets tanned like normal, and some of the other people at Zero seem to be able to circumvent her power entirely (the headmaster among them of course) though it is not clear why, but for the most part she cannot be moved, she cannot be stopped. Likewise she is impervious to projectile weapons, cutting weapons (in fact you could use her skin as a sharpening stone), striking weapons, scissors (she used to keep her hair short), and any kind of vehicular transportation. Oh, and of course she is still held under the pull of gravity.

Power Type: Genetic
Training Level: 0/1

The effect of her power causes a lot of problems, and as I see it that's half the fun.