Gossamer

Gossamer is a superhero who was briefly active in Colonial Bay.

Description
Gossamer stands 5'10" with a slender, sylphlike figure. Her features are delicate, her eyes sea green, and her long auburn hair blows in the slightest breeze. In motion, she is gentle, graceful and light on her feet.

She may be wearing just about any clothing, from a "traditional" skintight superhero costume to a long flowing dress, but always of the same material, a light, flowing, semi-transparent substance, layered thick enough to preserve modesty. Its basic colour varies, but it always has iridescent highlights.

Origin
It was an accident, of course. Bridget was working with samples of exotic extradimensional matter late in the lab, after even Dr Fogg had gone home, when his laboratory blew up – again.

The matter in question had found its way to Earth-1 during the first Rift Crisis, and had defied analysis, at least until Dr Fogg turned his attention to it. It was his current passion, and he believed that understanding it could help explain a lot of the "exotic" physics associated with superpowers.

When Bridget came to she found herself thrown clear of the building, and feeling more than a little strange. She was considerably changed in appearance, and had lost most of her mass. She had also been surrounded by a crowd of onlookers, some concerned for her, some recording the events on their PDAs – and so the existence of a new meta became public knowledge.

Powers
Gossamer's body has been altered by exposure to extradimensional matter. A curious effect of this is she is much lighter than her size would suggest. More useful is that she can extrude string, sheets and even more solid objects of "xeno-polymers", informally called "gossamer", which, though like plastics, are unknown to conventional chemistry. (It's a matter of conjecture whether somehow the physics and chemistry of another dimension are somehow being applied locally, or whether they an exotic state of matter than is native to this dimension but unknown to science.)

Gossamer can use these polymers to contain people. Applied to the eyes they can also blind people, or made to constrict they can crush them. Some of the polymers she can create are sticky, useful for making sticky patches of ground, climbing up walls or grabbing things at a distance. She can swing on lines of the stuff and even glide on gossamer wings, and her costume of laminated gossamer provides a lot of protection. She also has the ability to disintegrate the gossamer.

Personality
Bridget has always been curious, always wanting to know how things work, and that's what drew her to science: the never-ending quest to learn more. She's also more than a little reckless, especially in pursuit of knowledge – as is obvious from the fact that she dared take up a position with Dr Fogg, whose safety record is far from perfect.

She overcame the shock of her transformation with surprising speed, not least because she finds having powers fun! Being a superhero lets her use those powers, and naturally she doesn't really consider that it might be risky.

She finds that on the whole she likes the attention her new powers and appearance have brought her.

Relations
Gossamer was briefly a hero in Colonial Bay, but not for long enough to make friends in the hero community.

She has close ties to Dr Fogg.

History
Bridget had mostly had an uneventful but not unsuccessful life. She was born in Exeter, England, to a comfortably well off family. She did well in school, particularly in sciences; she was a bit nerdy, but not to the point of having no social life. She read chemistry at Cambridge.

But when it came time to do her doctorate, the opportunity came up to study at CBSU and to work with the (in)famous and brilliant Dr Fogg! She leapt at the chance, never one to let risk hamper her insatiable curiosity. She's learnt more from him than she ever did in her formal studies.

Since the accident, she can also be a superhero, and so, hopefully, be involved with even more strange phenomena begging to be understood, as well as satisfying her own need for a bit more excitement in her life.