Appearance:

(Picture by shinjyu)
If concrete walls were sentient, Ezekiel would be their ambassador. While being roughly average in height, he is built for width, appearing fat in the loose clothes he tends to wear (please ignore clingy shirt and leather pants in pic. I know it's hard. I did my best to get a better picture and failed :(). His movements complement this by being slow and deliberate, like an iceberg.

His eyes are brown, sort of. If one is to look closely, they would notice a narrow gray ring around his pupils, like the beginning of cataract. His hair is dark gray with a dull sheen, similarly to unpainted steel.

He always wears loose clothes, with a tendency towards pockets: Cargo pants, leather jackets, etc. There is always a tool or two on his person, including his favorite multitool. It is very rare to catch him carrying a weapon.

Power: METAL CONTROL
Ezekiel has a strange ability to shape metal. What can be done by heavy factory machinery, he does by will, simply by touching the metal part and concentrating. The effect is similar to exerting external force on the metal, but from within: It doesn't have to be in plain sight, but it does need to have the appropriate space around it in order to bend. For instance, Ezekiel can touch a concrete wall's steel foundation to bend a loose steel wire somewhere around it, but he is not strong enough to shape the foundations inside the concrete. Yet.

This power is similar to telekinesis, i.e. not requiring any movement from Ezekiel, but cannot be used without touching the metal part. It also takes some time, from seconds to a few minutes, depending on the hardness of the material, the size of the piece, and the severity of the necessary change. Turning a square block of steel into a long spear, for instance, would take about 20 minutes of concentration. Some extremely hard tasks, like bending a tank in half, may take days.

When Ezekiel lets go of the part he is changing, it will slowly return to its original shape. The process is gradual, and will take roughly the same time as it took to bend it out of shape. If some parts of the metal structure were snapped during the change, they will not reconnect, but still return to imitate the original shape. Speaking of snapping, Ezekiel cannot will a metal part to snap in half, as he needs touch to use his power. He can, however, force the part's middle to narrow, and finish the job with a hammer. He also cannot will anything on a metal part that touches the part he is manipulating, though he can push it out of the way with physical force.

For bending or similar actions, if Ezekiel uses his other hand to help the part along, the time of the process shortens drastically. No one else can help in this process - Ezekiel appears to exert impossibly high force on metal when he does this. The power of his abilities in general seems to rise in proportion to his physical strength.

This ability has some weaknesses. Loud sound weakens Ezekiel's ability, whether it's gunshots, explosions, or simply loud music. At high enough volumes, the sound causes physical pain all over Ezekiel's body and stuns him, and can even cause him to faint. Additionally, to retain his ability, Ezekiel must eat a certain amount of iron every day. At the moment, this amount is a couple of 10cm nails. What his body does with the metal is a mystery, but the chewing is probably just for show.

At the moment, the source of this power is a mystery.

Ezekiel was born to David Schmidt and Martha Solus. His father was the son of jewish engineers from germany that moved to the US with their parents during WW2. He met Martha in college - she was the star student and daughter of a bank CEO and he was on the verge of being expelled. She fell in love with his simple honesty, and he fell in love with her uncompromising ambitiousness. They moved together to a poor area, rebelling against both of their parents in the name of freedom of choice.

When their son was born, living in the slums became harder and harder for Martha. David was a car mechanic in a nearby shop, with no prospect for advancement since it took him very long to learn something new and apply it. She tried her luck as a teacher but was quickly defeated by the neighborhood kids' tendency towards drugs and crime. Every day she would struggle against her parents' offer of help, which required them to move to a richer part of the country and live by their rules, but her 2nd pregnancy defeated her. After a lengthy argument that took almost a year, she left, taking her newborn daughter with her and leaving her firstborn with David, "since he's a knucklehead just like you". In truth, she wanted at least one of their kids to live in freedom, and Ezekiel seemed tough enough to do it.

School was not kind on Ezekiel. He was fat and dumb, and his father wasn't much of a help, being fat and dumb himself. Eventually, at the age of 13, he started helping his father in the shop, and tried to be there as much as he could, since homework reminded him of school. However, he quickly found out the noise was borderline painful, so he would take breaks often.

In time, fat became muscle, and dumb became determined. He started skipping school to come early to the shop, or coming late because there was something urgent there in the morning. His large, rugged appearance drew the attention of a local high-school gang, who decided to remove him as a threat. They caught him one evening, on the way home from closing the shop, with castets and baseball bats. He was never good with words, so their wish to scare him quickly turned into an all-out brawl. One hit him on the arm so hard his bat broke, and another hit him square in the jaw with a brass knuckle. He fell like an oval tree, with dramatic slowness. Brass Knuckle came closer for a kick in the ribs, winced, and stopped.

His hand was bleeding. His fingers were broken. The brass knuckle was bent inward as if a truck just ran over it. He screamed, turning his pain into rage, and went for a knife in his jacket, but one of the gang members who was high on the uptake grabbed him and ran.

They met him a week later, on the same spot. His arm was broken. His face looked fine. They tossed him the bent brass knuckle, now cut apart by the firefighters' hydraulic tools to save Brass Knuckle's fingers. They asked what the hell. He asked what the hell. One of them withdrew a mannequin's hand with a brass knuckle on it and slapped him across the face. The hand exploded. The knuckle, now a shapeless bracket, rolled off.

They stood there in silence for a few minutes, the gang trying not to piss themselves, Ezekiel thinking about all the times a hammer or a screwdriver fell on his head without anything happening to it. He slowly lifted the mangled weapon from the floor, and tried to bend it. It felt like clay in his hands. One of the gang members had an aluminium baseball bat this time. He approached him, took the bat out of his unresisting fingers, and bent it into a circle. It took no physical effort, but he was suddenly really tired. He dropped the bat and ran. They did not follow.

When his arm healed, Ezekiel decided to test the extent of his power on larger things. He left school and started working in construction. The other workers recognized delinquency-ready-to-happen almost immediately, and enrolled him into various professional courses, to ensure his future. During the day, he would build walls or other structures. In the evening, he would learn plumbing, fixing electricity, driving. At night, he would go back to the piles of mangled steel on the construction site and train his ability. It did not work at day, because the construction machinery's noise was somehow interfering with it, just like the noise of his father's shop. Without noticing, he would take a bite out of a steel beam once in a while. For a few years, all was well.

They found him at night, at the construction site, after carefully following him for a few days. Another gang, feeling their authority challenged. They surrounded him. He fought off two, using his brute strength and some moves from the movies. Two more, larger and faster, caught him from both sides. The leader pulled out a gun. He just wanted to scare him, but Ezekiel was never good with words. Or with yielding.

After it was over, Ezekiel noticed he pissed himself. His left arm was not working - there was a hole just under his shoulder. The gang was gone. The leader was lying in an uncomfortable position on the floor - The pistol's handle was buried all the way to the trigger in the side of his head.

He was found guilty of murder. He was guilty of murder. In the courtroom, he wanted to die. On the way to prison, he wanted to die. After he read a note given to him by a passing stranger in prison, he suddenly wanted to live.

Ezekiel doesn't have many friends. People are often insulted by his direct approach, confusing it with arrogance or sometimes even hostility. He thus shies away from human contact, especially with women. A 'shoot, don't talk' kind of guy, whenever there is a job to do he always looks for clear instructions for whatever his part in the effort is, and proceeds to work with unrelenting motivation. This makes him rather easy to manipulate, since he rarely questions his part in a team effort.

He is quite curious about how the world works, but prefers to learn through his hands rather than through books - to work a cog wheel or an engine instead of reading about it. That said, if he'd have a choice between learning from someone or reading an instruction manual, he'd prefer the manual every time. He also has a knack for mechanics, an inner intuition that helps understand how complex mechanisms work from observation alone.

He is passionate about his power, often using small pieces of wire to make complex structures to work on accuracy, or exerting himself by bending large beams for strength. He also works out, ever since he found out growing stronger increases his control over metal. He prefers free weights and martial arts over any other kind of workout.

When he gets tired, either from using his power or just because the day was long, his power tends to leak, and various metallic items that he comes in contact with by accident begin to warp. To battle this he 'meditates' for about an hour every other day, by playing his Bass guitar with full volume. The sound calms him on one hand, and weakens his power on the other - and he would sometimes use the volume button as an exercise in control, trying to keep the guitar's strings from warping.