Original Superhero Character Concept - Fermia

[For an online superhero campaign that never happened, circa 2005]
FERMIA

Real Name: Sheryl Catelani
Occupation: Activist/adventurer
Legal Status: Citizen of the U.S. with no criminal record
Age: 37
Marital Status: Single
Base of Operations: Mobile

Background: Sheryl was born to a book editor of English ancestry, and a mother of Italian ancestry in 1963, Minneapolis, MN. Sheryl led a normal, well-adjusted childhood until her family took a vacation to California when she was 13. Her father was working with a nuclear physicist who was writing a manuscript about inexplicable phenomena, as if an unseen visitor was performing his own experiments. The would-be author was giving Sheryl and her father a tour of the facilities when an experiment of the unseen visitor turned dangerous. All three of them were caught in a spatial warp, where they briefly existed in the same space with a quantity of radioactive fermium. The experience was lethal for the other two, and would have been for Sheryl as well if the unseen visitor had not intervened. As the visitor merged with Sheryl to protect her, Sheryl learned that the visitor was a fourth-dimensional being who was teaching himself more about three-dimensional atomic physics when the unfortunate accident occurred. Sheryl was saved, but changed by the experience when she returned to real space. Portions of her body were transmuting back and forth between flesh and blood and pure fermium. While Sheryl was apparently unharmed by each transmutation, the appearance of fermium in her body was posing a health risk to people around her. Sheryl was hospitalized, first at a hospital, and later at a military research facility. The government was interested in her use as a living weapon. For the next 12 years subtle efforts were made to brainwash her into a killing machine.

In 1988, funding for Project Fermium was running low and Sheryl had proved almost immune to brainwashing attempts. Her fermium-laced body tended to shrug off drugs, and isolation never had the effect on her it was meant to. That was because Sheryl was never alone -- the fourth-dimensional visitor was now inside her. For several years it bothered her and made her feel dirty when it would manifest in her mind. Its thoughts were incomprehensible for a long time, but over the years she realized that she was feeling loneliness from Ford, as she named "him." Ford was trapped inside her, or at least part of him was. The three-dimensional world was a scary prison for Ford, and Sheryl was able to forgive him for the accidental death of her father.

It was in said year that Project Fermium was traded from the Dept. of Defense to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA saw potential in an agent who was both
super-humanly strong AND immune to radiation, and they tried a different tact than the military had.