Madame Zero

Once, Victoria Leonard was happy. She was married to the love of her life, with a comfortable home in the suburbs, and her career was on track with a bright future. She was the leading expert on cryogenics in the United States, working with ASTRO Labs to develop cutting-edge life support and organ preservation systems. A brilliant physician and researcher, she was well respected in her field, and liked by her co-workers. The world was her oyster and she was glad to be a part of it.
Until it all came crashing down.
Victoria’s husband, a successful lawyer, had been working late nights at the office on an important case. Victoria had barely noticed, engrossed as she was in her own work. One evening, however, she decided to surprise her spouse with a late night supper. Arriving unannounced at her husband’s office, Victoria was heartbroken to discover him in a compromising position with a female co-worker. Dazed and sobbing, Victoria ran from the office and back to her lab.
Victoria cried for hours, locked alone in her lab, before her husband called. He explained he was no longer in love with her and needed to move on, called her cold and dispassionate, and accused her of being more married to her job than she was to him. Devastated and overcome by despair, Victoria threw herself into one of her lab’s Freon tanks, intent on taking her own life. However, the unbalanced storage unit overturned and struck an electrical panel. Searing cold and a bright flash was all Victoria experienced before losing consciousness.
Victoria awoke in the hospital, almost immediately overcome by the intense heat of her surroundings. Even the metal of the bed frame seemed too hot to grasp. The nurses tried to calm her, but their touch burned like fire. All Victoria could think about was how she needed to cool off, wishing with all her might that it could just be colder. Suddenly the room seemed to go quiet as her surroundings became finally, mercifully, cooler. Victoria opened her eyes to find everything in the room, including the medical equipment and the nurses, encased in a thick sheet of ice. Gripped by surprise and panic, Victoria struggled to remove her now frozen IV, accidentally knocking over a diagnostic monitor and shattering an adjacent frozen wall, which allowed Victoria to escape.
Using her newfound powers, Victoria made it back to her now sealed laboratory and broke in. Some tests revealed Victoria was a changed woman. While she had the ability to generate intense cold, she was also unable to tolerate temperatures much above freezing. After hastily assembling the first incarnation of her environmental suit, Victoria gathered some scant equipment and technical data before disappearing into the night.
Proof Victoria Leonard was still at large came when her husband and his lover were discovered frozen in a block of ice in a conference room of his Freedom City law firm. Her need for vengeance satiated, over the course of the next several weeks Victoria looted several medical storage facilities to acquire the equipment she needed to improve her environmental suit and survive. This, combined with the murder of a prominent Freedom City lawyer, brought “Madame Zero” to the attention of the original Raven, beginning a long series of conflicts between the two.
Madame Zero was active in Freedom City during the 1960s. She was a constant source of turmoil for the original Raven, came into conflict with the second Lady Liberty on more than one occasion, and was a sometime member of one incarnation of The Crime League. Eventually, Madame Zero’s criminal career culminated in her capture by the Raven, putting her “on ice” for years.
Some twenty-five years later, while watching a cable special on new developments in life support technology, Madame Zero was enraged to discover ASTRO Labs had been marketing the fruits of her cryogenic research, claiming credit for the development with no mention of her involvement. Breaking out of prison, she began a one-woman war on ASTRO Labs facilities, simultaneously looting them for materials useful for her own research and experiments.

Physical Description

Special abilities

Madame Zero is a living cryogenic projector, able to create intense cold in her surroundings. She can emit a general aura of freezing temperatures hundreds of feet across and focus her power to create large masses of ice, shaping them into battering rams, ramps, walls, or coating surfaces with ice to make them slick and difficult to stand on.
Her frozen body is apparently ageless and immune to the cold she generates, while her armored environment suit provides the refrigeration she needs to survive, along with protecting against other hostile environments and attacks.

Mental characteristics

Intellectual Characteristics

Madame Zero is cold, both literally and figuratively. She shuns all human contact, and what compassion she may have had in her days as a physician is gone. She is a heartless killer, made even more dangerous by her vengeful nature.
Madame Zero’s primary goal, however, is and always has been to find a cure for her disability and escape the confines of her environmental suit. To that end she is constantly engaged in research and experimentation designed to reverse her condition. Most of her criminal behavior revolves around supporting that goal, whether it’s the acquisition of new equipment or sufficient capital to fund her research efforts.
Madame Zero has been known to hire underlings to aid in her bigger schemes. Similarly, she is likely to work with other technically minded criminals, particularly if they are capable of aiding her research. She has worked with various incarnations of the Crime League and has an on-again, off-again working relationship with Dr. Simian and, more recently, Doctor Shock.
Madame Zero’s strangest quirk is her environmental activism. She is gravely concerned about global warming and secretly contributes funds to a variety of environmental causes. On more than one occasion, she has even gone so far as to destroy or otherwise hinder the operations of corporations she knows to be flouting government restrictions on the emission of greenhouse gases. Heroes with similar aspirations might find an unexpected ally in Madame Zero.