[hider=Chad Belton]
[center][h3][b]Salem[/b][/h3]
[img]https://ak-cache.legacy.net//legacy/images/cobrands/tributes/photos/8442588_o.jpg[/img]
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1WZ9Smb5YI[/youtube][/center]
[b]Name:[/b] Chad Belton
[b]Alias:[/b] Salem
[b]Age:[/b] 16
[b]Alignment:[/b] Villain, technically.
[b]Loyalty:[/b] The Rockers, and more specifically Creep.
[b]Appearance:[/b] Chad has what people might call a baby face, rather smoother and perhaps slightly pudgier than you'd expect of a sixteen year old boy despite the angular jawline. With short brown hair and mildly unfocused brown eyes, he's not exactly a picture of standout attractiveness, though he gets by; somewhat more impressive is a physique that has been growing steadily more muscular since a certain incident at school, a result of relatively constant weight training and exercise on his part in order to try and fit his image of a real "alpha male".
His usual outfit is generally his school uniform, a piece that doesn't quite fit him properly at this stage, but which has all the usual bits with it - black felt trousers, woolen socks, and leather shoes; a light blue cotton t-shirt; and a much darker blue blazer over the top, complete with a ragged patch over his right breast where the emblem of his former school has been ripped off by bullies. 
His Cape costume is essentially a firefighter's outfit acquired for him by Creep, complete with yellow heat-resistant gloves, a white cloth headwrap, and a smoke mask with a tinted faceplate to mask his features and hide his identity.

[b]History:[/b] For the longest time, Chad was "the nerd" of the schoolyard. He was never especially popular as a child, having few friends in his home town and rather poor parents who rarely related to him as a young child, and spent a lot of his time looking up a variety of interests from the mundane to the absurd, and occasionally stuff that would be illegal to perform but was very interesting to look at, but once middle school and high school and their associated hormones began to accumulate in a small area, things really started to get worse for him. It started small - a shove here, an insult there - but he endured it. Things got bigger - a punch to the shoulder here, "accidentally" knocking him over there - and his psyche started to degrade, along with his actual grades. But he endured it. By the time he hit high school, he was being regularly beaten, and was well-known as "the weird quiet kid" for how little he chatted with others. But despite regular fantasies of buying a gun and shooting up the school by this stage, he endured it.

Mostly, he managed to endure it all by keeping up his friendship from early in middle school with a girl called Sheila Hopkins, something that he sustained despite his increasingly unstable mindset. For a little while, he entertained the possibility that she'd even be willing to go out with him, but ultimately let it go once she found herself another boyfriend, even after she'd dumped that boy for how the relationship failed to work out. If that obsessive schmuck wasn't right for her, then of course he'd be even worse. But, when she vanished two months later, he was left utterly alone, and now he had nobody to discuss matters with. Suffice to say, his situation only worsened further from there.

Still, he forced himself to remain in high spirits about how good he technically had it. At least he wasn't at risk of dying, after all! Or so he thought, anyway. Unbeknownst to him, one of the most innocuous of his bullies, a rich kid with too much spare time and not enough sympathy for the less-fortunate on his hands, had come to a conclusion about what Chad might eventually do, and decided he'd take matters into his own hands before it was too late. Paying a large group of other bullies to assist him, he and his posse cornered Chad one day, and with a gesture, the crowd converged on their target, fist after fist and boot after boot smashing into Chad's frame. He tried to endure it, of course, but eventually passed out from the pain and shock, shortly after the panicked realisation that this could really be what killed him.

The next thing he knew, he was in hospital. He'd been in a coma for several weeks, requiring another two months to recover from his wounds fully, and though a lot of his bullies were now in jail, and the rest claimed they were repentant, he knew that was a lie. He knew they'd be back to harassing him once he was in school again, and resolved to figure out how to stop them. The best he could come up with was to put an IED in one of their lockers without being seen. Nothing too big, just a small item to make them worry (and perhaps destroy some of their schoolwork), and both creating the device and breaking into the locker to plant it were simple matters, given what he already knew from prior research. Sadly for them, he miscalculated the strength of the device, and the victim wound up losing an eye to some shrapnel; whilst Chad was never pinned for anything, many rumours spread around the school, and most people started avoiding him from then on... but at least he wasn't being bullied anymore.

Nonetheless, he missed his sole friend. And furthermore, he missed the opportunity to interact with people at school, even if it was negative. He felt a growing desire, over time, to interact with others again - not to keep being hurt, but rather to make others hurt the way he'd been hurt, a desire that scared him quite viciously. To quell that want, he forced himself to turn that pain back on himself again, heading out to the local gym on a regular basis to exercise and train his strength until his muscles screamed at him. Over time, the thought entered his head that maybe the physical benefits he'd been seeing from all that exercise would help him rise up the social rankings, too - to help make him into an alpha male of sorts, rather than just "the weird kid". Everybody liked muscles, right?

To date, that hasn't worked out so well... maybe, he's been considering, maybe he just needs to make a change, somehow. Maybe the reappearance of his former friend could help with that, too...

[center][h3][b]Personality[/b][/h3][/center]
[b]Motivations:[/b] Keeping himself from inflicting too much pain on others, but also trying to make a better life for himself than he'd otherwise have.
[b]Sexuality:[/b] Straight
[b]Likes:[/b] [list][*][s]Leaving this world behind for a better one[/s] Watching cartoons, including anime.
[*][s]Dissociating from the harsher aspects of reality[/s] Daydreaming.
[*]Crafting stuff. Actually, he's got quite a wide range of things he enjoys creating, like clothes. [s]And bombs.[/s]
[*][s]Self-harm[/s] Working out.
[*][s][i]Making other people hurt for what they've done[/i][/s] Solitude. [b]Just solitude.[/b][/list]
[b]Dislikes:[/b] [list][*]Being made fun of.
[*]Being hurt.
[*]Being powerless.
[*]Stupid hairstyles.[/list]
[b]Derangement:[/b] Technically none. However, Chad has intense fantasies about the gruesome things he wants to do to those who wrong him, and if it's feasible, he will sometimes drag out fights for far longer than he needs to simply to indulge his sadistic fantasies.

[center][h3][b]Parahumanism[/b][/h3][/center]
[b]Skills:[/b] As a high school attendee, Chad’s skillset isn’t exactly all-encompassing. However, he does have a lot of leftover knowledge from his prior status as a “nerd” and the wide range of research he performed, including knowledge of how to produce items like explosive pellets and new clothing as well as how to pick locks, and a fairly surprising amount of strength for a sixteen year old of his build thanks to how much effort he’s put into working out, though very little direct fighting ability to go along with it.
[b]Classification:[/b] Shaker/Mover
[b]Details:[/b] Within a range of about 30 meters, Chad can superheat earth-based substances such as rock and sand to lava in a split second, and whilst in contact with molten rock can teleport to other pools of molten rock within this range too. Facilitating this, he is immune to harm from direct contact with all forms of lava, as well as to indirect heat in general; additionally, any effects that might be expected of a sudden massive heat increase in any rock he heats up are suppressed, though the heat convection itself is not.
[b]Limitations:[/b] Usual Manton limitations aside, his control over lava is specifically limited to superheating and cooling earth-based substances, with no ability to manipulate it once it's formed, and a rather limited and imprecise ability to figure out if he can do so to begin with if he looks in its direction; he cannot directly heat other substances, though they may be melted or caught on fire by any lava he generates, and whilst he can cool any molten rock in his range too, this takes several seconds to achieve rather than the near-instant heating process. Also, though he can teleport through lava whilst making contact in any way, including whilst fully submerged, he must emerge from a pool into open air, since the weight of the molten rock will not move aside in the same way. Finally, though he is immune to heat convection from any source, he is [i]not[/i] immune to being burned by direct contact with any substance other than molten rock and earth, which is important to bear in mind if they dissolve into a pool of rock.
[b]Equipment:[/b] N/A.
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