Winter

<infobox> <title source="name"><default>Winter</default></title>

<image source="Image"></image> <image source="image"></image> <group><header>Basic Information</header> <label>Civilian Name</label> <label>Aliases</label> <label>Gender</label><default>Unknown</default> <label>Death</label> <label>Age</label><default>Unknown</default> <label>Post-timeskip</label> <label>Ward start</label> <label>Relations</label> <label>Family</label></group> <group><header>Professional Status</header> <label>Occupation</label> <label>Classification</label> <label>Unique Features</label> <label>Alignment</label>

<label>Status</label><format>

Deceased

</format>

<label>Location</label> <label>Teams</label> <label>Previous Team(s)</label> <label>Base of Operations</label></group> <group><header>First Appearance</header> <label>Worm Debut</label> <label>Ward Debut</label></group> </infobox>Madeline,<ref name=25e2/> known publicly as Winter, is a supervillain and a member of the Slaughterhouse Nine.

Personality

Bonesaw described her as "sadistic, ruthless, cold." She was driven, rising above her roots, but "stagnated" once she reached the top.<ref name="25 e1">How to model Winter? She wasn’t truly a person who created or manipulated cold. It was a different power. A dampening power, causing objects and people both to lose inertia. The ambient effect was one of altered physics, the effect on people was one of will. The woman had gained power, money and more, and she’d found she liked tormenting people as much as anything else. She’d turned to the slave trade, then crossed paths with the Nine.

How to make the Winters with the materials she had? A child that had a gun in her hand before she could read, someone who had found the drive necessary to rise above her roots, meeting all expectations. She’d taught herself numbers and business, she’d ruthlessly eliminated competition, and then when she had everything she’d wanted, she had stagnated, rotted like an overripe fruit.

Searches for keywords in Cranial’s notes failed to turn up any of the necessary elements.
[...]
Melanie, the girl’s name was.

A week and a half ago, it had been so commonsense. A solution to her problems. The girl had been right there. So easy to approach. A tranquilizer shot to the neck, calculated on the fly to fit with body weight and overall health. Recalibrating the teleporting remote with the unconscious girl in the back lot had been a little riskier, but it was a quiet town.

Bonesaw had found herself busy enough that the girl could be left here, an IV in her neck, catheter and poop tube inserted. Now that she had free time, she could handle the Winter issue.

She needed a child soldier. This was a way to make one. To insert the wartime memories from Cranial’s database into the girl, let it steep, then harvest the results. The rest could be tweaked, rebalanced, fixed. - Excerpt from Interlude 25</ref> She would torture people she caught in her power,<ref name=26.2e1>I could feel the effect as my bugs entered the radius of Winter’s power. She wasn’t concentrating it, so it was mild at best. Slowing the movements of molecules, cutting down the ambient temperature, to the point that the moisture in the air froze. It also affected my bugs. Torpor.

For anyone within, it would include a mental torpor.
[...]
I advanced, but I didn’t step into the mist. The closer I got, the more of the affected area I could sense. The torpor forced me to be efficient, to manage where bugs went and how, to check areas in a cursory way. There were a number of people still in Winter’s area of influence. People were standing utterly still, slowly dying as the cold ate away at them. - Excerpt from Sting 26.2</ref> which recommended her to the Nine.<ref name="26.2 e3"/>

Winter was heedless of the Unwritten Rules concerning guns, likely due to her background.

Weaver believed that she was one of the few Nine members who would immediately report cheating up the chain, rather than seeing it as fun.<ref>They'd been okay with a little bit of involvement on our part.  Tattletale had speculated they would.  There were only a few who were so regimented they would report it to Jack at the first opportunity.  Winter was among them, but she was largely in the dark, here.  Screamer wouldn't fill her in if it meant spoiling the fun.

In truth, the only ones who wouldn't let us get away with this were Mannequin and King. - Excerpt from Sting 26.2</ref>

Relationships

Crimson

Her equally murderous lover before his timely death.<ref name="25e2">Winter, white-haired, with white irises edged in black, nude, her eyes peering. Madeline’s eyes, Riley thought. Winter would need guns, of course.

Crimson, Winter’s brief-lived lover. Riley had taken the time to program their relationship into them. Crimson had been one of the first members in the group, Winter one of the more recent ones to die. Winter had been followed by Hatchet Face -there he was, over there, nine of them- and Hatchet Face had been followed by Cherish. - Excerpt from Interlude 25</ref> The two usually operated as a team. They had synergy, with him operating as a front-line fighter so she could attack at range, while her power slowed people down so he could feed on them.<ref name="26.2 e2" />

Appearance

Winter is described as a white-haired woman with white irises edged in black.<ref name="25e2" /> Presumably she was fit as befit her military background.

Abilities and Powers

Winter's power did not involve cold generation per se as her name implied; rather, it was a dampening effect that caused bullets to lose their inertia, heat to seep out of areas, energy attacks to lose their fizzle, and humans to lose their will.<ref name="25 e1" /> She could likely concentrate her power in a smaller area, halting all motion, based on what was seen with a hybrid clone.<ref name="26.5">Chevalier fired his cannonblade again. One shot to polish off the remaining Hatchet Face that was closing the distance, and another directed at the Winter-Mannequin. The Winter-Mannequin’s power took the impetus out of the second shot.

The Wards were moving slower now too. Reacting slower. Tecton barely resisted as the Mannequin seized him in one hand.
[...]
Revel launched energy-orbs, but they barely seemed to touch the Winter-Mannequin hybrid.

Then Wanton closed the distance.

Ice chipped away, and the resulting chunks flaked away at the other pieces of ice. It was soon a localized blizzard, and the large hunks of ice that clung to the Mannequin’s suit began to break away.

More ice appeared, but it, in turn, was broken by the yet-larger chunks that had been picked up.

The storm began to slow as the Winter-Mannequin concentrated his power on a smaller area. The storm came to a standstill. - Excerpt from Sting 26.5</ref> Even at its widest and least intense, it reduced ambient temperatures to the point that moisture froze in the air creating a telltale mist.<ref name="26.2e1" /> When it was somewhat concentrated, the effect was strong enough to kill Weaver's bugs in seconds.<ref name="26.2 e3" />

People under its effect experienced a mental torpor, feeling their thoughts slow to a crawl. They would stand still as they died from cold.<ref name="26.2e1" /> This made her a highly effective hostage taker, and a good teammate to Crimson when he needed victims.<ref name="26.2 e2">And all of that raised the question of what Winter and Crimson were doing. I scanned the building. Nothing on the top floor, or the next lowest. Further downstairs, a number of people were in the sway of Winter’s power, their thoughts slowed to a crawl.

The basement of the same building. Winter, Crimson, and their hostages. Some would be the ones from Killington. Others were ones that had fallen into the sway of Winter’s torpor. Crimson was feeding on them. - Excerpt from Sting 26.2</ref>

The original Winter may have had even greater facility with her power then what was displayed by her clones in The Slaughterhouse Nine-Thousand.<ref name="26.2e1" /><ref name="26.3c1">Though it’s somewhat justified in this instance as they don’t retain their full memories – only cobbled-together personalities and histories. - Comment by Wildbow in Sting 26.3</ref><ref name="I26e1">The entity observed the ongoing conflict. No less than five seconds after it had been trapped, two figures had emerged from a doorway between worlds. The entity could see the paths forming, trace them back to the source. Another world, a living world without a shard occupying it.

They engaged the eight with their own perception abilities, intervening to assist a group of others. As a pair, they opened fire with guns, then waded into hand to hand combat.

The entity looked at the male, and it saw the connection to the same shard as the eight. His connection was stronger, more mature. - Excerpt from Interlude 26</ref> She was able to contain a precinct replete with heroes in her original incarnation.<ref name="I13e1" />

Equipment

Winter was known for carrying firearms,<ref name="25e2" /> including grenade launchers.<ref name="26.2 e3" />

History

Background

Madeline was conscripted as a child soldier, gaining basic gun proficiency before basic literacy.<ref name="25 e1" />

She became an arms dealer; Winter taught herself financial literacy, gained money and influence, then stagnated in her success. She found she liked tormenting people and turned to the slave trade, eventually crossing paths with the Slaughterhouse Nine.<ref name="25 e1" /> She survived the tests and joined.

She was one of the more recent members of the Nine to die, having long outlasted her lover Crimson on the team.<ref name="25e2" /> Killed by one of her teammates.<ref name="I13e1">A video of Winter, an ex-member of the Nine, engaging in a protracted siege against no less than twenty members of the Protectorate. She’d been killed by one of her teammates. - Excerpt from Interlude 13</ref> She had died before Hatchet Face did.<ref name="25e2" />

Post-Timeskip

Bonesaw cloned her as part of The Slaughterhouse Nine-Thousand. Winter proved to be one of the more intensive cloning jobs, necessitating the kidnapping and mutilation of a girl to create the necessary child soldier mentality.<ref name="25 e1" /> Winter was also used as material for Snowmann.<ref name="26.5" />

An instance of Winter participated in the Battle at Schenectady along with clones of Cherish, Screamer, and Crimson.<ref name="26.2 e3">Winter raised her grenade launcher and fired. Golem managed to vault himself away as he had earlier, a shallow movement that was forceful enough to nearly launch him off the building. He rolled on landing as the grenade disintegrated a corner of the building.

These two were warriors. Crimson was a mainstay of King’s era, when he’d ruled the Nine as more of a brute squad, not dissimilar to the Teeth back in Brockton Bay. I had trouble marking why Winter had been recruited, but it likely had more to do with how she was off the battlefield, her predilections for torturing people she’d caught in her torpor.

I reached the edge of the battlefield. My bugs streamed forth, a silk cord trailing between and behind them. The silk streamed out from the spinning spool at my belt. Hundreds of feet of material, and it extended out towards Winter.

It was only a matter of feet from her when she jumped, startled, leaping to one side. I missed, and my bugs were dying in a matter of seconds. The cord went slack.

A moment later, she was looking around, confused.

Cherish, I thought. She alerted her, a burst of alarm.

It didn’t matter. My swarm approached from the other direction, finding and picking up the dropped cord. Moving them within Winter’s effect range was a matter of relay, handing off to fresh bugs as they died. Slow but steady progress.

The moment the silk thread was around Winter’s neck, I dropped down to the edge of the rooftop, and used the mechanical arms on my flight pack to reel in the cord.

Darwin’s spider silk. Stronger than kevlar, a narrow cord of it made for a thin, almost unbreakable cord. The noose cut into her neck, and my arms and legs provided leverage to keep me still as the combined efforts of the mechanical arms provided the strength.

When she reached the base of the building I stood on, she was lifted off the ground. I shifted my position to improve my leverage and waited, hiding.

I could barely tell in the midst of her power, but I sensed her raising her arm. Raising the grenade launcher.

Nets of spider silk peeled away from the gray-white portions of my costume as my bugs pulled them free. I drew it out, connected the narrow sheets with knots of more silk.

It moved into place just in time to catch the projectile out of the air.

Golem managed to find a moment to use his power. A hand of stone struck the grenade launcher from Winter’s hands. - Excerpt from Sting 26.2</ref>

Fanart Gallery

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  By PB9

References

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Slaughterhouse Nine
Leaders	King {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Jack Slash {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }}
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Bonesaw's Hybrids	Hack Job {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Laughjob {{#switch: unknown	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Murder Rat {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Nighty Night {{#switch: unknown	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Pagoda {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Snowmann {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Spawner {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Tyrant {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }}
Clones	Damsel of Distress II {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Damsel of Distress III {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Harbinger Clones {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} (Harbinger I {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Harbinger II {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Harbinger III {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Harbinger IV {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Harbinger V {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }})