Jaimie Cullen

Jaimie "Element Girl" Cullen is a superheroine from the early 21st Century of an Earth in one of the DC Multiverses.

Personality
Jaimie is friendly, flirty, compassionate, but will make no bones about telling you when you overstep your boundaries. She prefers a good scrap to a whole lot of angsting and introspection, but she's more Zen than you might expect-- she's a methodical kind of scrappy.

Appearance
Standing at about 5 foot 6, Jaimie has that curious mixture of athleticism and curves so prevalent in the superhero community of her world. She has dark brown eyes and long black hair, usually done in braids.

In the field, she wears the standard uniform of The Everyman Project, as she has not yet found a new super-suit to wear since cutting ties with them.

Abilities
Jaimie is a brawler, a style-less fighter. She's hardly the expert that some heroes are, but she can hold her own for the most part.

She has a modicum of professional superhero training from the people at Everyman, giving her a cursory tactical awareness in rescue scenarios and in combat, but not extensive.

She has graduated high school, and has been studying physical sciences both at Everyman and since leaving to get a better hang of what different substances and energies are capable of.

Powers/Weaknesses
As a tactile omnimorphic absorber, Element Girl possesses the ability to copy and absorb and become things she touches. She can transform her entire body into a living version of a substance-- down to the last cell-- and even her clothes-- by extrapolating any sample big enough to touch (which is to say, she can't do it from a microscopic sample). When she absorbs a substance, she takes on its physical and chemical properties (the strength and conductivity of stainless steel, the chemical inertia of gold)-- but she also tends to copy its visual attributes as well: for instance, if she touches a fire hydrant painted red, she takes on the sturdy nature of its metals, but she also gains a layer of red paint; if she touches a plush toy, her dermis takes on the appearance of the toy (felt, button eyes), as her insides become, well, stuffed with fluff.

Jaimie can morph into mundane substances like steel, brick, rubber, plastic. But she can also morph into supernormal substances-- things like Kryptonite, depleted promethium, enchanted metals like Wonder Woman's Aegis vambraces, Nth-Metal and its 31st Century isotope valorium.

She prefers solids because she prefers the straightforward nature of punching and kicking. She can also copy liquids and gases, but she has a hard time holding onto her shape, her physical form. The one exception to this is mercury.

In fact, perhaps as a side effect of her Appellaxian DNA, she is best at manifesting the substances utilized by the original seven warrior gladiators that arrived on Earth. Wood, diamond crystal, mercury, glass, stone, gold, and fire.

Yeah, fire.

Jaimie can also absorb energies and energetic reactions and store them in her cells, sponging them up like a living battery and then emitting and manipulating them to willed effects such as energy blasts, forcefields, or flight. She does not become energy through and through like she does with physical substances-- her body remains unchanged, human and organic-- though she can wreath herself, sheath herself in energies if she absorbs it in sufficient quantity. Unlike substances, she cannot replicate energies she absorbs-- all she has is the amount available for her to absorb. If she absorbs the flame from a cigarette lighter, all she will have available is a little puff of fire, just a flash-- but if she absorbs the deluge of a flamethrower, she has much more to work with.

Just as with physical substances, she can absorb mundane things like light, electricity, heat, but she can also absorb exotic energies: magic, psychokinetic waveforms, zeta beams, extradimensional radiations, Green Lantern's Light, chronal energies, The Speed Force.

She cannot hold as much energy in her body as many aliens or magical beings or energy-based superhumans, nor can she retain as much energy as many artifacts... Superman would not exhaust his supply of solar energy trying to max her out with his heat vision, for instance, nor would Triumph note even a dip in his electromagnetic powers charging her up fully.

But she can hold more electricity, for instance, than it would take to power a city block for a month.

She cannot become a physical substance and hold energy-- she has to shed a material morph in order to sponge up power, though she can do so relatively instantly. Additionally, she cannot morph multiple materials at once (unless it's a side effect of presenting the physical appearance of a thing she's touched), or retain multiple energy types-- one absorption at a time.

Jaimie is also, again, limited by the amount of a substance there is. A mere bullet or an injecting needle would be enough for her to become entirely metal and repel the attack of said bullet or needle. But if she's injected with a trace amount of poison, she cannot absorb and become the poison to prevent its effect on her, and is just as vulnerable to it as any other human. If she's injured in her human state, she can become another strong solid substance to help her keep standing, moving, fighting, but as soon as she reverts to her normal form, she will exhibit those injuries again and require medical attention. On the other hand, if she is dented or dinged or broken while in a material morph, she can undo that damage by reverting to "carbonform" mode.

When she absorbs a substance or an energy, she has a sensory awareness of her shift in structure or composition-- she can synaesthetically "taste" substances and energies she's absorbed in order to tell them apart, though this is more qualia than quantification and she cannot always (sometimes but not always) describe the precise differences between, say, uranium isotopes or different wavelengths of light.

Equipment
Element Girl has struck out on her own relatively recently, and as such has not had a chance to amass her own arsenal of personal gadgets (possibly by befriending a gadgeteer/inventor hero or at least joining a team with greater resources). As such, she retains the superhero uniform and other tech she received upon qualifying for The Everyman Project.

This suit is a proprietary LuthorCorp aramid: bullet-resistant, fireproof, breathable, and able to work seamlessly with her superhuman abilities. It also has wireless connectivity so that an operator at a corresponding LuthorCorp terminal can monitor her vitals and maintain communication-- this also makes it Bluetooth compatible so she can connect it with her Lex/Icon smartphone, earpiece, and watch.

Pre-Horizon
Jaimie grew up in the Hob's Bay area of Metropolis on the East Coast of The United States, the most dangerous part of an otherwise shining city, nicknamed "Suicide Slum" by a hyperbolic press. Her parents were loving, but beleaguered, working hard to earn a better life for Jaimie and her brother, and from them she learned the value of standing up for her fellow man even when it wasn't easy, and the value of bettering herself through study.

She attended high school under the tutelage of a local legend by the name of Jefferson Pierce-- secretly also Black Lightning --and listened in awe as he gave speeches that combined anger at the treatment of black people over the centuries with tempered compassion and heart and striving for a better tomorrow. He spoke in equally reverent tones of Superman and Steel, and decried the malevolence that was the local gang-- The One-Hundred.

Jaimie's grades were solid but not phenomenal, so she applied for multiple local colleges to try and stay close to home, maybe use what she'd learned to make her neighborhood a better place.

And that's when billionaire magnate Lex Luthor announced The Everyman Project.

No longer, Luthor promised with a smile, would super powers belong to an elite few. With the Everyman Project, synthetic metagenes would be available to the world. He described a pilot program, starting with a handful of Metropolitans and then, once proof of concept had been established, he claimed that they could easily go nationwide, even international given UN approval.

Having seen the good that heroes could do, Jaimie applied to join... and qualified, to her surprise and delight.

A number of different superhuman powers were given to individual Everymen, derived from different sources. The sample written into Jaimie's DNA had been based on Locus technology, who in had experimented upon the Appellaxians whose invasion had been the event that first brought the legendary Justice League together.

As these were elemental creatures, die-hard survivors, Jaimie discovered she soon had the power to adopt and adapt, to absorb almost any physical substance and take on its form, or to drink up almost any energy and channel it to her will. She became Element Girl.

Not long after, however, Lex Luthor's connection with the ruthless Intergang and their local affiliates The One-Hundred was brought to public light by a Daily Planet exposé. While Lex engaged in the most dizzying spin campaign in history and came out virtually unscathed, the damage was done as far as Jaimie was concerned.

If there was even a chance Lex had helped bankroll the gang that kept her neighborhood on high alert, that had kept her childhood a fearful one instead of one spent more at peace... then Jaimie wanted nothing to do with him.

She packed up her things and struck out on her own, beginning the struggle of a solo hero, but before many days had gone by she closed her eyes one night... and woke up Somewhere Else.

Trivia

 * Jaimie is, unbeknownst to her, a distant ancestor of 31st Century Amazers and Legion of Superheroes members James and Jazmin Cullen, respectively the first and second Kids Quantum, as her descendants will help settle the distant planet Xanthu from whence those heroes hail.