Physical description: 5’7”, 145 lbs. She’s tough and muscular, a girl who looks like she hit the gym instead of the salon. She’s half-mexican, with tanned skin and black hair. Her hair is jet black and is cut in a really ragged way. She generally lets it stick up and such. It ends just below the base of her skull. She has thin eyebrows that always seem just a little bit angry There is a scar running vertically through the end of her right eyebrow. Her face is heart-shaped, with a chin that sticks out a little bit from the rest of her face. She generally has a frown on her face.
Sierra’s left arm is prosthetic from the shoulder down. It is made of a blackish grey metal with light grey joints. It makes a very quiet whirring whenever she moves it at all, though it’s not the loud mechanical clunk that you usually hear from robotic arms. As this is the future, the arm is fully functional and is just as strong as her right arm. Sierra’s right arm is covered in tattoos all the way down to her wrist. Said tattoos include a mexican flag, an eagle with a pink ribbon in its mouth, and a rattlesnake. Sierra wears a light grey tank top and a pair of jean shorts. She wears beat-up sneakers on her feet.
Sierra Alvarez
I’m no ball of fucking sunshine, but don’t say I never worked for anything.
Backstory: Sierra was born in New Mexico. Her parents were farmers, honest, hard-working people from an immigrant family. Sierra was the second-oldest of six. She didn’t like the farm lifestyle so much, and wanted with all her heart to live in the city. From a young age, she showed a natural talent and enjoyment with working with machinery. She used to help her father fix farm equipment on a regular basis and loved getting to go into town with him to visit the mechanic. She worked as hard as she could in school, hoping to be able to get away from her family’s farming lifestyle. She was exceptionally intelligent, and got straight As from first grade through to her junior year in high school, where she got a single B that made her so angry she went out in the yard and smashed a rusted-out car with a sledgehammer. When she learned how to drive, she got a job at the mechanic shop in town and began to learn how to work with machinery. She got a scholarship to MIT’s engineering program. Her parents were so proud of her that they bought her a motorcycle, a nice tough black one. It was the first vehicle that Sierra ever owned. She bid her family goodbye that summer and drove across the country on that motorcycle with her girlfriend, who was attending nearby Harvard (her parents didn’t know they were together. They were the homophobic sort).
Sierra was smart, but the world was against her. She was a woman in a man’s world at MIT, and she felt the discrimination hard. Others treated her as if she didn’t belong. She started drinking, smoking, all that shit to cope with the pain. She joined feminist organizations on campus and wrote letters to the chairmen of the engineering department. She tried adding a gender and women’s studies minor to her mechanical engineering degree. The school threatened to pull her scholarship. After falling in love with circuitry, she switched to electrical engineering sophomore year. She worked with robots, built computer systems more advanced than those in government offices, but still no one gave her the respect she wanted. Sophomore year she found out about her powers while at a party. A guy tried to come onto her. He tried to get her drunk. He told her he would “fix” her little lesbian problem. He was sent to the hospital with four broken ribs and severe respiratory problems due to smoke inhalation. That night she lit up her first cigarette. It wouldn’t be the last.
Now Sierra was really as much of a freak as she could get. She was a mutant lesbian minority woman in an engineering department filled with straight white men. She became a recluse, started practicing her powers a lot in her room. She broke up with her old girl and started messing around with her roommate. One night they were having sex and she accidentally breathed smoke into her roommate’s mouth. They didn’t fool around no more after that. Sierra started dating another girl on campus, a chemical engineering major who felt her same pain. Like her, she was a metahuman too. It was improbable as all hell, but it was true. Maybe too good to be true.
Senior year Sierra and her new girlfriend went out on a drive. They ended up in the middle of the wood. They had sex leaned up against a fallen tree. They lit up a joint and got high. Sierra pulled out a handle of whiskey. Her girlfriend got sick. Sierra decided it was time to go home.
She woke up from the coma a month later. Her left arm was gone. She had broken half her ribs and both legs. She had brain damage and severe scarring. Apparently the two had collided head-on with an SUV that night. Sierra had been fucked up real bad-like. Her girlfriend wasn’t even that lucky. She was found twenty feet from the collision, her skull busted and her head bleeding onto the asphalt. She was dead before the shit the ground. Sierra spent a year healing and another learning how to walk again. She learned how to write with her right hand. She attended class in a wheelchair. A few good friends of hers, some of the guys in the program who understood and supported her, built her a prosthetic arm. She helped with the wiring and some of the bio department guys figured out how to get the arm to connect to her nervous system (that was commonplace in a hospital, not in a college). She had her arm back. She graduated and got a job as an electrician to pay for graduate school. She got back together with her original girlfriend, whose name was Claire. Everything looked great.
Then the shit hit the fan. Metas began getting hunted down left and right. People were taken off the streets. Sierra was safe until one day Adelon started doing genetic tests on MIT students. She was arrested and taken away in her second year of grad school. She’s been on the island for about a year now. She’s made a business for herself in fixing up electronics on the island. She has a regular gig fixing farming equipment for the guys at site Haeda and always has food on her table because of it. She’ll fix any electronic people can find, no matter how complex. The price is usually the same: a cigarette or a lighter. Sierra will do basically anything for a smoke these days. She spends most of her day either fixing machinery or hunting for cigs. There are very few left around, so it’s quite the challenge.
“Smoking kills, kids.”
Power: Smoke generation and manipulation: Sierra has the power to create and manipulate smoke telekinetically. She can either alter the movement of smoke made by other things or produce her own smoke, which is inky and contains a lot of mucus. Said smoke is highly toxic, sticking to the inside of the lungs and making it hard to breathe. Prolonged exposure to the smoke can cause asphyxiation and death, and can cause chronic breathing problems. Sierra can release her smoke from her mouth and nose and can then manipulate it by moving her hands. The smoke is so thick and dark that not even advanced optics technology can see through it, making it the ultimate cover for an escape. Sierra can also manipulate the smoke caused by other objects, such as a cigarette, car exhaust, or smoke bomb. She can use her powers to amplify the production of smoke from these objects. Cigarettes, in particular, are very useful to her, as they both increase the volume of her smoke and increase the heat of the smoke, making it even more unpleasant for those trapped in it. Sierra can cause her smoke to condense on a surface into a thick, filmy sludge which helps her with her second ability. Sierra is completely immune to the effects of smoke inhalation. She also cannot get cancer from any kind of inhalant, so she can suck on cigarettes all day with no ill health effects. Basically, smoke cannot harm her body at all.
Sludge manipulation: Sierra can manipulate oil and sludge as well. This can constitute as any kind of oil, from gasoline to motor oil to very high-proof alcohols. Like her smoke, Sierra can telekinetically control sludge, and can use it for both offensive and defensive purposes. She has learned how to alter the viscosity of the sludge. By increasing the viscosity, she can cause the sludge to become sticky and tough, sticking enemies to walls or cushioning blows. By decreasing the viscosity, she can manipulate her sludge as if it were water, creating constructs that she can defend herself with. She can limitedly control the temperature of her sludge, but only within a few degrees, so she cannot freeze or boil it. She can control oil or sludge of any temperature, so she tends to heat up sludge artificially before fighting with it so it will do more damage. If she wants to go all-out, Sierra can make a sludge clone of herself that mimics her movements. She can use this as a decoy as well as a way to attack opponents from a distance. Her decoy can release smoke as well, though it’s much thinner and basically only serves to make it mimi Sierra more.
Weaknesses: As far as smoke goes, Sierra can only produce so much smoke and doing so dehydrates her. Sierra’s inky smoke requires her to use a ton of her own body fluids, draining her body of water and making her dehydrate rapidly. In addition to this, Sierra’s smoke can be blown away by a strong wind. Sierra can only control smoke in a twenty foot radius of her, so if it’s blown out of that radius she can’t use it. Also, her smokescreens can be blown away with wind. Another problem with Sierra’s power is that her smoke can react with CO2 in the air and produce carbon monoxide. For those who don’t know, carbon monoxide is poisonous to the body and can kill a person if they are overexposed to it. While Sierra is immune to smoke inhalation and the cancer-causing effects of things like cigarettes, she is not immune to carbon monoxide. This means that if Sierra stays in her smokescreens for too long, she will get carbon monoxide poisoning. Sierra also cannot see through her own smoke, so she needs to know where she wants to go and how to get there before she tries to escape from a place.
As far as Sierra’s sludge goes, Sierra has a very hard time controlling a lot of sludge at the same time. Creating a decoy or construct with her sludge powers requires her undivided attention, so she can’t make more than one or use her smoke at the same time. She can’t make anything particularly complex with her sludge save her decoy, and said decoy can only mimic her exact movements, so it can’t, like, defend her or anything. 
