Her costume is basically a long black sleek dress with a hood and a mask.

Destino.

It seems almost inevitable that Carmen Vega would become La Chica Muerta.

Carmen was born in Juarez, Mexico. One of the most dangerous places in the country. Her mother worried about raising a child in such a place though and eventually decided to leave. So at a young age, Carmen and her mother moved to Tijuana. They had little money to their name however and they often struggled to make ends meet.

When Carmen was around six years old, her mother started dating a man named Bruno. Carmen didn't know much about Bruno. All she knew was that she didn't like him. She had never known her dad and when she asked her mom about it, all she would say was that he was a deadbeat and they were better off without him. Despite this, Carmen always had a picture in her head of dad as some great hero who would swoop in one day and rescue them from their miserable lives. Maybe that was why she didn't like Bruno so much. He was anything but a hero. A thug and a bully, yes, but no hero. He would often push Carmen's mother around, intimidating her into doing whatever he wanted. She basically became his slave.

Bruno had a tattoo of a skull on his steroid filled arm and routinely got in Carmen's face, telling her how how there was one just like it under her pretty little face. He would do this while generally running her down, reminding her that she was nothing and poking at her head. He continued doing this for years. All the while the anger built in Carmen until she finally snapped and punched him in the throat.

Carmen remembers how good she felt in that moment as Bruno fell to his knees in shock and surprise that a ten year old girl had just punched him. Finally putting a bully in his place felt amazing. She smiled at Bruno as he knelt in front of her but Bruno's shock quickly faded to anger. She doesn't remember much after the back of his hand connected with her face. Mostly sounds. Crashes. Something breaking. Bruno yelling. Her mothers voice and....another one...A voice she didn't recognize.

When Carmen woke up, she and her mother where in a place she didn't know. Her mom told her they had crossed the border into America. This seemed like a good thing to Carmen, yet her mother seemed angry.

“You need to be more careful.” she told Carmen. “One of these days your bravery will get you killed.”

Carmen didn't know about that but she did know that punching that bully Bruno had felt really good. Even if the bruise forming under her eye hurt like hell.

Life in America was different but the Vega women seemed to do a lot better than they did back in Mexico. Carmen enrolled in a school where her grades steadily improved to an impressive level and her mother got a decently paying job and even met a new man. One which Carmen actually approved of this time. It was no small feat to win the approval of young Ms Carmen Vega. Although buying her all those video games may have helped.

Carmen was occasionally difficult. In her teenage years, she would often get into fights for no other reason than she liked to fight. Again, her mother went off on a rant about how she was going to end up in the hospital or the morgue one of these days. Carmen paid little attention to this though. She knew how to handle herself and it wasn't like her grades were failing or anything. In her mind, she was just letting off some steam. She wasn't going to die or anything.

Overall, life seemed to improve for Carmen....right up until she died.

It wasn't long after Carmen had entered college that everything went to hell. She had gone out drinking with some friends one night. Carmen wandered off on her own, half drunk and unwittingly ventured into a bad neighborhood right as a conflict erupted between two rival gangs with a number of innocent people caught in the middle. There was one young man in particular with a terrified look on his face as bullets whizzed past his head.

Carmen, being Carmen, was hardly about to let someone get hurt and, without even thinking about it, tried to tackle one of the thugs with guns to the ground.

She barely even heard the bullet before everything went dark.

........

In a strange echo of the time after she had punched Bruno, Carmen once again woke up in a place she didn't know. Only this time, her surroundings were much less friendly. She had woken up in the county morgue.

Absolutely terrified of what this meant, she quickly got dressed, pocketing the toe tag on her foot and the file next to her and fled before whoever worked there returned. After this horrifying experience, Carmen became convinced that her mothers warning had come true and she was now dead. After hiding in her dorm room for what felt like forever and watching Adventure Time on a loop to try and calm herself down, she decided to run some tests. She learned that she barely bled at all and any wound would heal amazingly quickly. Nothing about this was normal.

She also learned that others died in the same shoot out. Surprisingly, this, more than her own apparent death, seemed to push Carmen over the edge. She decided that something had to be done about these thugs who thought they could just take someone's life without a second thought.

This was when Carmen adopted the identity of La Chica Muerta...The Dead Girl.

La Chica Muerta took the fight to the local gangs with a surprising ferocity. In her mind, she was already dead so she had nothing left to lose. Every time one of them thought they had put her down, she just got right back up again.

Stories of La Chica Muerta spread through the neighborhoods. She became an urban legend. The boogeywoman that haunted the criminals of the underworld. When tales of this regenerating woman who couldn't be killed spread far enough, members of the superhero community sought out La Chica Muerta, thinking that someone with her particular power may be useful. They quickly learned that she had gone off the deep end and was almost as dangerous as the criminals she fought. She was a liability to have around.

La Chica Muerta never much wanted to play in the same sandbox as the super men and women of the world but their assertion that she was a dangerous lunatic pissed her off. She has since begun to spread out from her comfort zone of punching gang members in the face and groin and has begun tangling with some actual super villains...C list villains, but it's a start. She'll prove those uppity capes wrong eventually.

Today, Carmen tries to balance her life as La Chica Muerta with what little life she has left as Carmen Vega, all the while trying to outwit a particularly nosey detective who has taken it upon himself to investigate the girl who supposedly died one day but is still walking around.