Full Name: Frances Schmidt

Alias: White Skull

Nicknames: Frankie

Birthplace: Munich, Germany

Current Residence/Base of Operations: Mobile

Species: Engineered Human

Gender: Female

Age: 25 (Chronologically: 70+)

Alignment: Villain

Allegiance: HYDRA

PHYSICAL

Height: 5’7
Weight: 125 lbs
Hair Color/style: Brown, usually short
Eye Color: Copper
Other: Frankie has thick scars lining the exteriors of her arms and legs as well as the back of her hands and feet. She almost always looks sickly pale and emaciated. Dark circles usually rim her eyes, giving her the appearance of being malnourished and overworked.

Equipment and Weapons: Full body-suit, black in color, reinforced with lightweight armor plating. Recessed beneath the plating at the base of her spine is two vials of Death’s Head Serum, ready to be automatically injected via spinal tap should the suit’s biometric monitors find that the amount of serum in her veins is running low. This is only a 16-hour supply; anything lasting longer will need additional refills and the serum vials can be broken if enough force is applied to the armored plating. The biometric system also includes a tracker that only Zola can access so that he knows where Frankie is in the field at all times.

Powers:
Genetically modified bone structure – Thanks to Arnim Zola’s work, Frankie possesses thorn-shaped bones that line the sides of her arms, front of her legs, back of her hands, and the heels of her feet. These bones can be released from or retracted into her body, making them the perfect undetectable weapon. The bones have also been modified to be outstandingly strong, able to withstand several tons of force and pressure. Since the bones recede into her skeletal structure, they create a strong skeleton and reinforce Frankie’s body against damage.
Accelerated immune system, metabolism, and healing factor – Zola also tinkered with Frankie’s DNA. Her immune system is superior to that of an average human by far, granting the woman immunity from illness. Her metabolism works double time in order to fuel her immune system and her healing factor. The healing factor lessens the recovery time for wounds when compared to a mundane human. For instance, the lacerations Frankie’s bones cause her body would take an ordinary human several months to heal. Frankie is ready to go in about a day. This, however, does not heal scars or slow down the aging process.

Skills: Speaks fluent German, French, English, and Italian, conversational Mandarin and Japanese. Master in hand-to-hand combat and her own personal fighting style. Tactically trained. High tolerance for pain. Resistant to torture. Advanced acrobat. Stealthy. Experienced marksman.

Weaknesses:
1.) Pain – It is usual for Frankie to be in a great deal of pain, whether it’s because she’s healing from a prior field mission or because Zola’s work hasn’t necessarily settled well with her body. Frankie has built up a high tolerance for pain, but there is only so much she can stand before her body begins to fail her, as much as she hates it. This also has an impact on her psyche, slowly causing it become increasingly fragile over time.
2.) High metabolism – Frankie must consume at least 3,000 calories a day in order to keep up with her heightened metabolism. Without a high caloric intake, Frankie risks a complete body shutdown.
3.) Death’s Head Serum – The Death’s Head Serum has been developed by Zola specifically to be applied to Frankie before she goes out into the field. This serum will catalyze her healing factor into an almost instantaneous reaction and provide stamina for hours to ensure that Frankie is, for lack of a better word, unstoppable (unless the damage inflicted to her proves to be overkill). However, once the serum wears off, Frankie either needs immediate medical attention or another dose. The Death’s Head Serum risks overworking Frankie’s body if administered consistently for a period longer than 24-hours, causing cardiac failure and death.

FAMILY:
Mother: Esther Steinberg (Deceased)
Father: Johann Schmidt (Deceased)
Siblings: Sinthea Schmidt (Half-sister, estranged)
Children: N/A
Extended family: Arnim Zola (Guardian), Hermann Schmidt (Paternal grandfather, deceased), Martha Schmidt (Paternal grandmother, deceased), Josef Steinberg (Maternal grandfather, deceased), Zipporah Steinberg (Maternal grandmother, deceased), Moses Steinberg (Maternal uncle, deceased), possible cousins (Status unknown)

TELL US ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER

Personality: Cold. Harsh. Bitter. All of these are fitting words for the daughter of Johann Schmidt. Little affinity or affection has ever been shown to her, and so she responds to the world in kind. Being put in command of what remains of HYDRA has only hardened Frankie further. She’s cold, calculating, and ruthless working for the cause, not the people who support it. If a subordinate displeases her, she will not hesitate to immediately kill them with a bone to the throat or the heart. If a plebian truly incurs her wrath, Frankie will instead draw out their death – playing with them idly until she thinks that the guilty party truly understands their error, or until she finds the exercise tedious. Fear is far more effective in a leadership position than loyalty.

The nagging pain she often feels from healing and from the aftereffects of Death’s Head Serum and Zola’s experiments has made her patience almost non-existent. She wants action now, not five seconds from now, now damn it. She is one for achievement, not talk, not posturing. Frankie believes that no one, not even Zola, truly understands the crushing weight of the task put upon her. She will not waste her time on small schemes or operations – when Frankie determines that HYDRA is finally ready to conquer the world and subdue it, she will do it in a big way. Casualties will be high, especially for civilians, but she does not care. They are the offspring of a wretched world, and they should be happy for the release that death brings.

Frankie has never “loved” anyone per se, but she does have some semblance of allegiance for Arnim Zola. He is the man who raised her and turned her into the person she has become. Her father is but a flickering memory in her head, revered as a sort of demi-god more than an actual person. There is only one creed for Frankie, and that is her father’s dream of world domination. She has an incessant need to see it realized and to exceed his hopes for her – She has been repetitively reminded how disappointed Johann was that she was born a woman. Frankie possesses a compulsive need to prove her worth to a dead father, which strengthens her convictions in an almost spiritual way.

Privately, Frankie is secluded. There are no friends in her world – only allies, tools, and enemies. Her loathing for SHIELD and the heroes of the world has increased over the years. She harbors a hatred for Merit because he found her and HYDRA and risked them losing whatever progress they had made since she was awakened. Frankie still dreams about him some nights and wonders whether he was a true clone of her father’s most hated enemy – whether Steve Rogers had the same golden hair and azure eyes as the man she slowly killed. Would her father have been proud? Would he have been horrified? And what would have happened if her father never found her? Would Frankie have lived a normal life and died years ago? These are questions that will never be answered and are best not to be dwelt upon. She does not have time for personal or intimate relationships. Frankie is going to rule the world. Anyone who gets in her way is nothing but collateral damage waiting to happen.

History:
Johann Schmidt thought that he beat Esther Steinberg to death on the evening that he forced himself upon her. Though his fury was great, the job was unfinished and Esther, though savagely beaten, clung to life. Her parents and brother found her mangled body and were able to take her to hospital before she expired. The doctors sustained the broken woman, but Esther would never recover from the traumatic brain injuries Johann Schmidt inflicted upon her. Her family could not bring themselves to allow her to die, so Esther lived on in a comatose state. Only a month or so had passed before the attending physicians noticed that her stomach had begun to grow.

Johann learned that Esther, the woman he had loved and sought to possess, was still alive mere weeks after he had been taken under Adolf Hitler’s wing. Disguising himself as an orderly, Johann entered Esther’s hospital room, surveying his work in her smashed face and mangled features and, finally, her swollen belly. Convinced that the conception was fortuitous and meant to be, Johann left Esther alone. In the following months, he would return occasionally in his disguise, surveying the growth of his child within her. Johann was convinced it was a boy, a son to carry on his legacy as he planned to supplant Hitler and conquer the world for himself.

One day, Johann found a different patient in her room and the comatose woman nowhere to be found. A quick check of the hospital records and innocuous questioning of some of the staff led Schmidt to discover that his child had been born prematurely, and that Esther had finally given up the ghost once her baby drew breath. Her parents had taken their grandchild home and buried their daughter. Johann had worked for the Steinbergs, so it was easy to break into their house and simple to smother both the old man and woman in their sleep. Finally, he tiptoed into the nursery… and to his utter dismay found that his child was no son, but a daughter: a frail sickly girl with brown hair and eyes that glowed like molten copper.

Years later, Johann would never be able to pinpoint why he took the child instead of leaving her there. His heart could not feel pity, and the only semblance of love that Johann had ever known was his twisted lust for Esther. But Johann claimed his child and left the Steinberg house for good. He gave the baby to Arnim Zola, instructing the biochemist to engineer his child into an acceptable being worthy of his lineage. Zola did not want to disappoint.

The biochemist tinkered with the child, toying with her DNA, experimenting on her, and using her for all manners of tests. He improved the child’s immune system first and foremost, empowering the girl beyond the limit of her premature birth. A wound that would take weeks or months to heal would only take days, and not even the strongest disease or virus could overcome her frail form. Schmidt had neglected to give his child a name, so Zola called her Frances, after his grandmother. He quickly shortened it to Frankie after finding that “Frances” provided too much of an emotional attachment that did not allow him to perform objective experiments upon the girl without worry for her levels of comfort or happiness.

The experiments continued regularly until Johann Schmidt died at the hands of Captain America. The man had all but forgotten about his daughter, so when Zola transferred Schmidt’s preserved mind into a clone of Captain America, Red Skull was reminded of Frankie’s existence and able to survey Zola’s progress. While the improvement to her immune system was met with some satisfaction, Schmidt was still overwhelmingly frustrated with his daughter. But she was the only legacy he would leave behind if the worst should happen – So Schmidt instructed Zola to do whatever was required to turn his daughter in the ultimate weapon and, once that was completed, to cryogenically freeze her should he die without any possibilities for resurrection. Frankie would be the last hope for HYDRA and Schmidt’s vision of world domination, should all else fail.

It took a couple years for Zola to coax the results out of his subject, but once he was finished, Frankie was all that Schmidt could have hoped for. Zola had been able to catalyze her bones to mutate and develop in ways that no skeletal structure was ever meant to be. Retractable thorn-shaped edges made of bone would lay hidden inside of Frankie’s limbs, ready to be unsheathed at any second and used to slit throats and open flesh. The price for such results was high. Zola had to kick Frankie’s already heightened immune system into overdrive and, when that wasn’t enough, a special serum (called the “Death’s Head serum” in honor of Red Skull) was developed to cajole Frankie through the worst of the effects of her engineering without her body or her stamina expiring. The adolescent girl’s body was riddled with scars and ravaged from the amount of recovery time needed due to such invasive surgery, but Zola considered her his biggest success. He paired this with training in acrobats, stealth, hand-to-hand combat, tactics, and marksmanship. Following Schmidt’s orders, Frankie was cryogenically frozen, waiting for the time when HYDRA and her father would need her most.

Frankie was roused after the so-called heroes defeated HYDRA and finally put an end to her father’s long reign of terror. Zola had been one of the few who survived and Frankie, well protected in one of HYDRA’s hidden underground bunkers, awoke to a very different world than she remembered. Technology had advanced past her wildest dreams and countries and alliances had changed, but the purpose that her father’s work and Zola instilled in her burned as brightly as ever. During her absence, the world had gone mad. HYDRA had attempted to bring order to the world, to subdue its wild ways and degenerate citizens. But those that the corrupt governments heralded as protectors had overthrown the entire organization, leaving little more than Frankie and Zola to rebuild. This was a wild wicked world in need of a ruler, in need of domination.

Drones and henchmen were easy to procure. Many people had scores to settle after the civil war ended, molding them into pliable tools for Frankie and Zola to command. The adolescent girl blossomed into a young woman adept at leading either through their shared cause or through fear – whatever seemed most beneficial at the time. A sixth Sleeper had been created with all of the technological advances and applying everything that HYDRA had learned from their experiences with the prior five machines. Frankie and Zola moved their operations to a HYDRA bunker near Leipzig, Germany.

It was here that Frankie first met a genetic clone of her father’s greatest enemy. Merit, a clone of Steve Rogers/Captain America, somehow received wind of the sixth Sleeper’s whereabouts. He breached the bunker, taking out a few drones in the process. It was long enough for Zola to inject Frankie with the Death’s Head serum and suit her up.

Both juggernauts met in head-to-head combat. Frankie used her genetically modified body for the first time, hacking and slashing at the clone with ruthless abandon. Combat awoke something within Frankie that she had never experienced – some carnal, primal desire to defeat anything and everything before her. Perhaps it was because she had been pushed into this, perhaps it was years of repressed rage kindled by the agony of experimentation, or maybe it was simply what she had been built for. Regardless, she defeated Merit utterly, but not before he was able to damage the Sleeper. His crumbled body lay at Frankie’s feat, bleeding profusely but still alive. He had set back HYDRA’s operations by months, if not years, and he had been able to find them when they wished to remain hidden. It would have been easy for Frankie to just slit his throat or pierce his heart and end it quickly.

But Frankie had a better idea.

Experimenting with small amounts of the Death’s Head serum to keep Merit alive, Frankie slowly di- and vivisected the clone. She was incensed that this pathetic excuse for genetic material had the gall not only to discover that HYDRA still existed, but damaged the last relic she possessed from her father – and thought that he could beat her when Zola had engineered her for victory. Frankie ripped Merit to shreds over the course of several weeks and sent pieces of Merit to those he answered to, beginning with his Achilles tendons. His screams and moans of pain were what lodged in her chest where parental affection had never found a home. She savored each cut, each tear of tissue, and each indication of suffering from the clone until, finally, not even the serum could keep him alive.

Zola realized too late that his ward’s actions would draw undue attention from SHIELD. Using the excuse of the need to fix the Sleeper and conserve Frankie for when she was both needed and able to be used, he froze her once more. Since Frankie had proved volatile and over-aggressive, Zola also took the opportunity to scan her brain and attempt to place a mind-control device in her skull to keep a leash upon his subject. However, her immune system and healing factor would not allow a foreign man-made object to exist within her body. The heightened defenses of the body ate away the microchip Zola implanted and damaged any other attempt for control. Zola was left with no option but to either keep Frankie frozen or having to trust her judgment. Since HYDRA had few other options, Zola chose the latter.

Frankie was revived several months ago, and for now HYDRA has been operating under the radar. However, the day is coming when Frankie will lead HYDRA in a full onslaught against the heroes who destroyed her father. Her motives are pure and simple – rule the world, or obliterate it in the process.

Face Claim/Play by: Keira Knightley

Secret Word: YOUGUESSEDCORRECT!

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Player: Megan
Experience: 12+ years
Other Characters here: Cassius Fury and Tabitha Whitman
How'd you hear about us? Omi, oh my, oh yes.
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