Mitosis

Real Name: Alyssa Leach
Hero Name: Mitosis
Alignment: Neutral Good
Birthdate: July 24th, 1995
Gender: Female
Race: Human (Metahuman)
Hair: Chestnut brown; variable
Eyes: Brown; variable
Height: Usually 5ft 1in; 1.55m. Can change with power use.
Weight: 150 lbs; 667.5 newtons, on average. Fluctuates in connection to power use.
Blood type: O-



Alyssa has a stocky build that fits her short stature well. Her face is round with features composed of soft curves set in pale skin, lending a younger appearance than her age would suggest. She wears her chestnut brown hair as a wavy bob that reaches to the top of her jaw.

While in costume as Mitosis she sports a beige bodysuit decorated with purple spirals, wearing a IIIA ballistic vest underneath. She conceals her face with a plain ballistic mask, painted to match her suit. As an additional precaution she changes her appearance using her power, altering eye and hair color along with facial features at random.



The once trusting and relaxed Alyssa has given way to a woman who is withdrawn and abrasive. Where she once followed the flow and tread the path of least resistance, she now pushes through the world with impatience and rebellion. But this is a shaky facade, one fueled by deep-set anxieties and the urge to hide them, even if it means pushing others away. Only with those few she still trusts is she able to open up some.



Born as the youngest of five, Alyssa had a childhood where she often felt out of place. She shared few interests with her siblings, leaving her feeling isolated at home. School was better for her: though she was shy at first, Alyssa learned to make friends, finding peers who she could trust.

A point of tension in her youth was the onset of epilepsy not long after she started public school. The seizures made her parents overly cautious and restrictive at a time in Alyssa’s life when she was just starting to explore the world around her, leaving her feeling cut off.

Fortunately the condition was resolved after significant treatment, and by the time Alyssa was a teenager her seizures seemed to have stopped entirely. Still, it had left a mark on her psyche. Isolation from her peers in childhood left her desperate for attention, and she learned the easiest path was to find a niche and fill it.

This lead to her becoming something of a party girl in high school. Neither particularly smart or attractive, Alyssa had found a place for herself in the social hierarchy as a girl who knew how to have a good time, and more importantly, help others have a good time.

In college a particularly wild party resulted in Alyssa’s first seizure in years, leaving her to question the identity she had created. She realized then that she couldn’t live her life that way, and not just for her health. Her friends had started to move on from that life, focusing on their futures. Alyssa, mindful of her childhood, was determined to never be left behind by her peers again. She changed her major from communications to investigative journalism, picking up extra courses to meet the new degree’s requirements.

Ambition could only go so far, and it soon gave way to struggle. Try as she might, Alyssa had never been a good student, and lacked essential skills. To compensate she turned to sheer effort instead, spending long nights studying and working. This proved unsustainable, the hours of lost sleep causing migraines that often triggered seizures.

Wary of the way she was treated as a child, Alyssa went to great lengths to hide the return of her epilepsy as best as she could. Fear of worsening seizures and a return to a fragile existence quickly developed into paranoia and panic attacks, culminating in a complete mental breakdown during finals week of her Junior year.

All Alyssa remembered was being sprawled out on the bathroom floor of her dorm, pulling her own hair out with such force she had started to tear away chunks of her scalp. Then as if no time had passed she found herself in a padded room, bound in a straitjacket. Attempts to speak only produced gibberish; when she tried to move, Alyssa found her limbs responding in all the wrong ways. Trapped in a body that no longer felt like her own, Alyssa endured what seemed like an eternal hell.

Alyssa had nearly unraveled on a fundamental level and in doing so, barriers had been broken. As she struggled to exert any measure of will over herself she found something deeper, and with it, started to rebuild.

Walking through the doors of the hospital with her family behind her should have been a triumph, yet Alyssa only felt hollow. She had survived, but her future was forfeit. From there she simply existed, barely doing more than necessary from day to day, living at home with her parents. Being back in her hometown had some comforts, people were at least sympathetic, but as the days went on Alyssa couldn’t help but feel a sense of deja vu. That she was damaged, fragile, a thing to be watched over. One year after the hospital she left her Midwestern hometown, without even saying goodbye.

Settling in Chicago gave Alyssa a new lease on life, a feeling of agency she’d never had. With this newfound freedom she experimented with her power, exploring its aspects, and getting into some trouble along the way. She gave up on trying to live a normal life, reveling in how different she had become.

And yet, something was still missing. Alyssa realized she still needed purpose; as much as she wanted to tell the world to fuck off, doing so felt pointless. And though she had found enjoyment in her power, she couldn’t reconcile it with who she wanted to be.

Alyssa realized that the only way to heal would be to accept what she was, marking her entry into the world of costumed heroics.



1. Agility
2. Strength
3. Reaction
4. Endurance




Dynamic Growth

Mitosis possesses fine control of her body at a cellular level, capable of shifting the net capacity for cellular replication however she wants. Using this she can grow new parts of her body and change existing ones at will. Unless accelerated using her regeneration method, growth occurs at a natural rate. Parts of her body that are not in her natural bodyplan can be rapidly digested from the inside and converted into raw material to be stored for later, usually as a cellular slurry with fat-like consistency. Any digested part must be regrown the usual way.

Deep Interoception

Mitosis’ power grants her intuitive understanding of her biology, such as internal homeostasis, cell line integrity, and various other details that are unknown to normal humans.

Regeneration

Mitosis can concentrate cellular replication on wounds in order to heal faster, halting normal cellular replication elsewhere in her body in proportion to the increase.

Enhanced Immunity

With the sense provided by her enhanced interoception, Mitosis can custom-tune her immune system to respond to infections and diseases, integrating information from her biological sense with medical knowledge to far surpass the capabilities of the usual human immune system.

Anti-senescence

Through fertilization of one of her ova with her own DNA, Mitosis creates genetic clones that she harvests for totipotent and pluripotent stem cells, which are used to replace aging cell lines in her body or kept as raw material. The cell replacement process is not entirely automatic: it must be initiated manually and guided at certain stages.



Thermodynamics

Like all living creatures, Mitosis cannot create something from nothing. Using her abilities at natural rates requires caloric and nutritional intake proportional to the amount of growth or change occuring. Accelerated growth requires more sustenance proportional to the base requirement and the amount of acceleration. In the absence of adequate food intake, her body will cannibalize itself for the requisite energy and material. Mitosis can control where cannibalized material is drawn from, so long as it can actually meet the needs of the growth.

Entropy

Use of her power to accelerate healing or growth draws from the replicative capacity of all of the cell lines in her body, which cannot replicate forever. This effectively accelerates the rate at which her body ages; extended power use will significantly affect her health. This can be reversed using her abilities, however she cannot use her power to accelerate the repair process, leading to long recovery times.

Neural Feedback

As is natural, new growth comes with soreness and pain during the process. Acceleration multiplies this proportionally. Given the focus required to grow or change parts of her body, pain can impact the quality of the result. Mitosis can mitigate this by forgoing the usual amount of nerve growth, but the resulting part’s dexterity and senses will suffer accordingly.

Essentialism

Mitosis is limited by human biology, and must work with the components that are normal to a human being; in particular, her own being. Any new growth must come from expression of her DNA and thus be assembled from cells it encodes for. Human-normal expression, such as an arm or a kidney near their usual locations, is relatively trivial so long as she can integrate it, and will grow more or less automatically with minimal input once conceived. More exotic growths, such as eyes on the back of the head, or teeth for knuckles, require conscious effort to visualize and form. Use of her power to fine-tune organs or senses cannot exceed the capacity of human beings.

Cerebral Limit

The least mutable part of Mitosis’ body is her brain: while she could theoretically modify it, she has no way to easily revert it should she make a mistake. Because of this, her ability to control her body is limited by her motor cortex. An extra limb or two is not difficult to integrate with her existing nervous system, but unnaturally complex limbs or particularly well-muscled parts would require her to design their nervous systems to draw from already used outputs, requiring a sacrifice of voluntary control, or the inability to use two or more limbs at the same time in different ways. Her control limit is about fifty percent greater than the number of voluntary muscles in the average human, giving her a budget of one-hundred sixty extra voluntary muscles.



Femur mace: A modified femur grown by Mitosis to use as a handheld weapon. The lower end narrows to a handle and the head is oversized. Unlike natural bone, the surface is made up of fluoride-treated tooth enamel on a backing of dentin, thickest on the head. Opposite the head is a massive canine tooth, elongated to a spike. The bat is made of live bone which Mitosis can link to via canals in the handle; she uses her power to link with it and maintain it once a week, keeping it refrigerated when not in use to slow down its metabolism. It is twenty inches long and weighs about a pound and a half.



Alyssa has made significant changes to her internal biology, mostly in the realm of convenience and quality of life. Several nerves have been rerouted away from areas prone to injury, and major nerves have redundant backups should they be damaged.
A major difference is the presence of a hydraulic circulatory system for movement raw material used by her power, which connects reservoir spaces disguised as subcutaneous fat. These reservoir spaces are spread fairly evenly, usually storing a total of twenty pounds of various progenitor cells intermixed with ten pounds of fat, which are used as raw material and an energy source, respectively. To refill the reservoir material from a single totipotent stem cell would take about forty-three days; generally Mitosis only drains it to under an ounce of material, which will refill to full within twelve days, provided she meets the nutritional and caloric needs.

Alyssa uses her power for hygiene, absorbing and reprocessing most surplus skin oils, sweat residue, and dead cells.
She does not wear makeup; it is unnecessary as she can control the state of her skin.