Ezekiel redefines the term "Heavily-built". He would look like a really fat kid at first, but a closer inspection would reveal he is more square than round. Indeed, his large shoulders are even wider than his girthy hips. His arms and legs, while not appearing toned or very muscular, have a very determined shape about them that no doubt harbors hidden strength. His face is wide and square-jawed, and his large head is supported by wide sinewy back muscles typically seen on wrestlers.

As far as social standards go, people immediately expect him to be clumsy and unaware, like an elephant in a porcelain shop. But observation reveals something strange: His footsteps, slow but carefully measured not unlike that of a martial arts practicioner, posess a certain momentum - as if every limb on his body carries some invisible excess load. His movements are as deliberate as a russian ice-cracker ship. Despite this, he does not carry himself with projected confidence or aggression. He simply moves, like a force of nature.

Ezekiel's face has the kind and timid features commonly found on gentle giants. But his refrain from human interaction becomes apparent almost immediately, as he rarely upholds eye contact, and generally wears an increasingly anxious expression whenever in a conversation with a stranger. This can be easily interpreted as shame or fear, and in fact, it is a combination of both.

The hair on his head, and in fact all over his body, is a dull gray, like an unpainted and unpolished steel beam. Combined with the constant weariness of conscience in his eyes, Ezekiel looks perhaps ten years older than he really is. His timid, unexpectedly high-pitched voice reveals his true childish character. This color repeats in a small ring around his pupils. He hadn't noticed, but it increases and sends angular black streaks outwards when he uses his power, making his eyes look like cracked eggs filled with tar. The effect disappears a few moments after he stops. For now, it is visual only, and does not interfer with his vision.

Ezekiel dresses for function - cargo pants, leather jacket, simple undershirt. He seems to have a preference for pockets and heavy-duty material, most likely relating to his short past as a construction worker. It should be noted that work clothes are the most probable to be made to fit his size, since construction workers come in all sizes and generally have nothing to do with fashion. Another sort of people who come in all sizes are music fans - and Ezekiel can quite commonly be found wearing a shirt of one of his favorite bands. His taste in music is quite wide, but his shirt selection focuses on Metal, especially the kind that has alot of bass in it. Themes of skulls or general violence typical to the artwork of these bands, in combination with his construction worker fashion, make him look like a bike gang member. His gray hair only makes this effect worse.

He would always have some sort of tool or scrap metal on his person, along with his favorite steel multitool.

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. As the physical workings of the world are intuitive to him, he often does not understand how it is not obvious for others, which once again makes him look arrogant.

After his 'incident', Ezekiel tries to stay away from human contact in general. From outside, it looks like borderline social phobia, and this is not far from the truth. Ever since his fight with a purist who wanted him maimed or worse, Ezekiel constantly fears for the well-being of everyone around him. He killed that man, with his own hands, without using any kind of power, just because he got frightened. It is the fear of this lack of control that guides almost every interaction Ezekiel has with others. He thus constantly tries to hone his power, while continuing to train in the art of physical combat, to gain the self-control necessary to prevent harm to others. This urge increases with every conversation he cannot avoid having, so he keeps a piece of scrap metal on his person to train his control whenever he can. That is not to say he runs away from people - he simply becomes increasingly uncomfortable when having a conversation that does not have a specific, professional topic.

Ezekiel 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 at 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.

Ezekiel wasn't really schooled, and has an assortment of professional skills instead. He worked as a car mechanic, construction worker, and a general repairman, learning how to make basic plumbing and electrical repairs as well as driving trucks and heavy construction machinery. He is far from being a professional in any of these fields - he simply had a taste of each, and can probably not burn a house down while fixing a power outlet, or smash it down while driving a crane on the nearby road.

Living in a tough neighborhood while being quite stubborn and hard to hurt, he had been in many fights. A combination of official martial art studies and experience in streetfighting made him posess a practical method of physically dispatching of threats - preferrably with something blunt found nearby. His style is rather sluggish, and focuses on short-range blocks, grapple attacks, and wide sweeping attacks that are easy to avoid but most probably very hard to block without taking some of the impact. His fists are slow to move, but once they start moving, very hard to stop.

Due to his conditioning, Ezekiel is quite strong relatively to a teenager. He is unnaturally heavy, and strong for his weight, and thus able to climb or jump like a normal athlete half his size. He can run for long distances, but cannot run fast, or do anything that requires sudden bursts of speed properly. For some reason, his body is rather stiff, and does not allow fast or jerking movements to be effective.

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 - David's mother was ready to disown him for not going to a university, and Martha's father had no other future planned for her than being a successor to his work.

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 change their entire lives, 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 to reassess their dominance. 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. One of his fingers was broken. The brass knuckle was bent inward as if he punched a wall - a rather unfortunate fact due to it being a cheap knockoff that snaps under any impact. 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 plastic mannequin's hand with another brass knuckle on it and slapped him across the face. The hand exploded and the weapon rolled off, with no apparent harm to Ezekiel's face.

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. Why wasn't the hammer ruined then? He slowly lifted the mangled weapon from the floor, and tried to bend it. It felt like lead in his hands, bending with only a slight effort. One of the gang members had an aluminium baseball bat this time. He approached him, took the bat out of his unresisting fingers, and grunted as his good hand forced it into a circular shape. His muscles felt fine, 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 wire 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. The leaders of the gang have changed, and they were now a collection of drunks, thieves and druggies. The new leader's nickname was knuckle, due to a mangled right hand, and he was the kind of person to take nicknames seriously and personally. In short, he was back for revenge. Ezekiel barely noticed his hand close around a bundle of steel cable clippings which he promptly shoved in his mouth.

The men who surrounded Ezekiel wore rags, looking homeless and underfed, but had a strange, determined kind of depression about them. Two tried to jump him, but were shaken off using brute strength and some moves Ezekiel saw on TV. Then, suddenly, from the back of the crowd, two men taller and stronger than him lunged forward and grabbed him from both sides. Knuckle, once an evil-eyed kid, now a mangy-haired, somewhat muscular hobo with an awful smile on his face, waved a gun at Ezekiel's nose. He just wanted him to understand his place, he said. He was doing him a favor. But Ezekiel was never good with words. 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. Knuckle 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. For a good hour he could not move, frozen solid by fear, fatigue, and a feeling of his body being full of dry, reinforced concrete. The police found him standing over Knuckle's corpse, after the image had plenty of time to burn itself in his mind.

The trial was short and quiet. It was obvious no one was really interested in the outcome. After all, the story was always the same - some kids fighting over drugs, some getting hurt and others dying. His father was too poor to hire a real lawyer, and the state-assigned one didn't have any motivation whatsoever. In the end, he was accused of manslaugher, and sent away to be jailed. Nobody realized how much this affected Ezekiel personally. He was a murderer now, wasn't he?

He was clay in the hands of the guard who led him away.

Father: David Schmidt, car mechanic, alive
Mother: Martha Solus, teacher, unknown
Sister: Rachel Solus, unknown, unknown

Elemental: Metal Manipulation

Current State
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: The piece 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. Warping a metallic piece rather than bending it takes even more effort - Turning a square block of steel into a long spear, for instance, would take about an hour of concentration and would prevent Ezekiel from using his power throughout the day. 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 revert 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. A potential use for this ability is wearing a welded metallic frame and shaping it along - This would provide defense as well as offensive capability, limited by Ezekiel's strength and stamina.

This power has a subconscious side as well. If attacked by metallic objects, Ezekiel's power will react to repel these objects. He does not have to be aware of the attack. This does not work against attacks with large chunks of metal (like a construction beam) or bullets with a high caliber. If shot from short range, the noise of the gun will interfere with this ability and Ezekiel will get hurt.

Ezekiel's body is a bit tougher than a human's, assumably because of metallic residue in his muscles or bones. At the moment, this is not much more effective than his muscles.

Future Advancement
* Fast shaping and kinetic shaping: Once the speed of the shaping reaches a certain point, Ezekiel will be able to exert kinetic energy from the bending of metal. This means that he can make a metallic pole that's stuck in the ground hit someone, or destroy a reinforced wall by having the steel foundation inside smash it to pieces. This also means that a metallic frame would increase power and speed.

* Liquid shaping: The metal object's final form is not limited by his surroundings or his original shape. It can be reduced to a free-flowing liquid (I guess mercury-like), then shaped into any form that takes the same amount of material. It cannot increase in mass, of course.

* Temperature shaping: After receiving kinetic shaping, IRON will be able to add or remove internal vibration energy in the metal, increasing or decreasing its temperature within a certain boundary. This also means he will not be affected by the temperature of any metal he touches, as long as it is within a certain boundary. This power still requires touch so things that are too hot or too cold are out of the question. A suggestion to limit this - instead of adding or removing thermal energy, IRON can transfer it, cooling one object to heat another.

* Iron skin: Ezekiel's body gradually hardens to become less and less susceptible to physical attacks. He can increase this ability temporarily by eating a larger amount of metal, but this would make his movements exert the power, and if he gets too tired he would not be able to move.

* Delayed shaping: After receiving Fast shaping, Ezekiel can decide to increase the time the new shape holds after he lets go of it, to months or even years. He can also slow down a shaping in progress on purpose.

*Extreme kinetic shaping: With enough planning, Ezekiel can make a metal beam swing around and launch a part of itself as a projectile (By decreasing the size of the connection between the two pieces just as the end of the beam comes around).

To affect a metallic piece, Ezekiel must be touching it directly. Excessive dirt, paint, or even certain types of industrial coating may completely prevent Ezekiel from manipulating a certain part. Impure metals that are mixed with carbon fiber or other strengthening materials are much harder to bend, since the amount of material under Ezekiel's effect is smaller, and the strength needed for the bending is larger. If two pieces of metal are welded, however, or if the coating is another kind of metal, Ezekiel is able to bend it all as usual.

The range of this ability, i.e. how far from Ezekiel's hand can he make the metal move, is about a meter and a half. Thicker metal increases this range slightly, while also being harder to bend. He doesn't have to see the moving part of the metal piece, but he does not gain awareness of it colliding into something, so a bending attempt can go to waste if not planned correctly.

Loud sound weakens Ezekiel's ability, whether it's machinery, explosions, or simply loud music. Depending on the volume, Ezekiel may become unable to bend thick metallic objects, or unable to affect metal at all. At high enough volumes, the sound causes physical pain all over Ezekiel's body and stuns him, and can even cause him to lose consciousness.

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. Whenever he fails to eat this amount per day, he loses his powers completely, until the next time he has access to any kind of metallic object. Even despite this strange diet, Ezekiel has a limit of how much power he can exert before he has to rest, similarly to physical fatigue. He can eat more metal to fight this fatigue, but the effect has a short duration, and the excess metal consumption slows Ezekiel's movement throughout the entire day.