Adrienne Frost

Details

Character Journal: xp_adrienne

Real Name: Adrienne Lucille Frost

First Appearance: April 11, 2008

Date of Birth: March 31, 1975

Place of Birth: Boston, MA

Citizenship: US

Relatives: Winston Frost (father), Hazel Frost (mother), Emma Frost sister, Cordelia Frost (sister), Christian Frost (brother, deceased), Tandy Bowen ward

Education: MBA from Harvard Business School, Education Certification from Oxford University

Relationship Status: dating Garrison Kane

Occupation: X-Factor Investigations, co-owner of eVolution, CEO of Meridian Enterprises

Team Affiliation: X-Factor Investigations auxiliary X-Men member

Biography

Early Years

Adrienne grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, and was born into a family of great wealth and power. Her position as the third child of four meant she was mostly ignored by her parents, which had a tremendous bearing on her emotional development as she grew up believing that she would always be ignored and perceived as being flawed unless she could win her father's attentions and show him that she was everything he wanted in a child.

This desire to gain recognition and love from her father, the most powerful person she knew, led Adrienne to shun her sister Emma's love and ally herself wherever possible with her father, though he continued throughout her childhood to ignore her. After Emma was taken to the asylum when Adri was ten, her father's torment of his son Christian increased and Adrienne, desperate to please her father, contributed to Christian's emotional abuse while following her father's example of ignoring Cordelia.

Her psionic power of psychometry emerged when she was eleven and Adrienne discovered that her father wasn't planning on dividing the family fortune and business up evenly between his children, instead choosing one sole heir. Driven by her hatred of being invisible to her father, Adrienne vowed to be his successor. With the help of her power, on which she had a tentative self-won control, Adrienne excelled in school and continued to ally herself with Winston in the hopes of being chosen to take over the Frost Enterprises company and fortune from him. Her brother's suicide when she was fourteen had little effect on her besides a feeling of relief that her father would have one less distraction in his life and might finally notice her now that both Emma and Christian were out of the picture.

Adrienne worked hard in school and as a model and spent her early teen years enduring her father's sexual abuse, mistakenly perceiving his perverse practices as affection and relishing in his attentions until being once again cast aside in favour of her younger sibling Cordelia.

After graduating at the top of her high school class, Adrienne was accepted to Harvard and planned on achieving her MBA to prove without a shadow of a doubt that she was the perfect person to take over Frost Enterprises for her father.

The summer before she went to college, Adrienne was convinced by someone (she doesn't even remember who) to go to the Sierra Tuscon Treatment Center as she had developed a certain affection for cocaine. At that point she had lost all control over her powers. Her accidental readings of the place showed every grisly detail of relapses and overdoses and sheer misery of addiction which turned out to be a wake-up call and led to her success at kicking the habit. Because the images she sees never fade over time, they are always with her to keep her from falling off the wagon. After a twenty-eight day treatment she started at college.

Shortly after arriving at Harvard, Adrienne received news that Emma had been awarded Frost Enterprises. This infuriated Adrienne, and though most of her anger was directed at Winston, whom she had worked her entire life to please, she vowed never to speak to Emma again out of jealousy and resentment. She accepted the money Emma sent to her with plans to start her own company and become more successful than her sister.

Phase 1

Post-degree

Adrienne worked as a model throughout college and received her MBA at twenty-three, marrying law student Steven du Clos in her final year of school after a courtship of six months. Du Clos was drawn to Adrienne by her looks and popularity as a model, and Adrienne, hungry for all the attention and adoration she could get, subjected herself to DuClos completely. Du Clos loved that he was able to possess Adrienne like a pet and Adrienne loved the attention, giving their union a precarious balance for more than a year.

Immediately after graduating, Adrienne used her stipend from Frost Enterprises to launch a small modeling company which she called 64 Square to honour her lifelong love of chess. Her models began attracting attention very quickly and Adrienne basked in it and grew to finally begin appreciating herself, but her work took her away from her husband, and du Clos, who was used to having everything he desired at his beck and call, was angered. Steven began physically and sexually abusing Adrienne, trying to keep her subject to him. For several months Adrienne put up with the abuse as she'd done with her father, but she found herself preferring the more widespread public attentions of the business world to Steven's form of attention and thought about ending the marriage.

Using her powers, Adrienne came to understand that if she didn't get rid of Steven he would one day kill her. Her desire for self-preservation led Adrienne, just shy of her twenty-fifth birthday, to realize for the first time that she would rather be safe and be invisible than have Steven's kind of attention. Steven du Clos was killed in a mugging under suspicious circumstances while on a business trip to New York but his grieving widow was never charged with any crime.

Following her husband's death Adrienne reverted back to the Frost family name she had fought her whole life to live up to and for the next several years she buried herself in her work, determined to build up her company to international fame and gain the respect and adoration she so desperately sought. The modeling agency expanded into fashion design under the label 64Square (which is actually a logo and not the name of the modeling agency with no space.) Understanding the value of loyal employees, Adrienne was a fair boss but remained solitary and untrusting, keeping her distance from any friendships, not wanting to ally herself with anyone or create any bonds. A ruthless businesswoman who put her powers to use to take over multiple companies in a short space of years, Adrienne began gaining a reputation not unlike her father's, though she stayed in her own circles and away from Frost Enterprises. Her marriage to the abusive du Clos and her father's long history of abuse had made her untrusting of men and the fact that she never dated garnered her a reputation in society for being frigid. While in public she seemed sociable enough with men, the self-preserving streak in her wasn't going away, and she had developed a fear of men who were physically attracted to her, quashing any romantic relationships before they could start.

At the age of 30 it was suggested to Adrienne that she share her business sense with students, and as this seemed like the perfect opportunity for her to attract attention and adoration of future generations she began work on her Postgraduate Certificate in Education at Oxford University with aspirations to teach math and business. By the completion of her program, her powers were beginning to become more than she could handle and she grew tired of wearing gloves, but unable to ask for help she fought on her own for better control of her powers.

After teaching in London for a year, Adrienne was called into an investigation by New York police and was accused of orchestrating her husband's murder on the basis of new information provided by an enemy in her business circles. Ordered not to leave New York while the authorities investigated her and searched for evidence, Adrienne was forced to comply out of fear for her public image, not willing to damage her company's reputation. Estranged sister Emma intervened on her behalf and Adrienne was encouraged by authorities to work at Xavier's School where she could be monitored while they pursue their investigation and also receive help controlling her unstable powers. Adrienne arrived at Xavier's as a supply teacher for the math department, replacing a string of substitutes who had been running the classes since Bobby Drake's departure.

Becoming Involved

Shortly after arriving at the school, Adrienne began building connections with people such as Garrison Kane for their shared love of baseball and rivalry over the teams they support, Vanessa Carlysle a fellow cynic and snarker with the same crude sense of humour, and Amanda Sefton also cynic and snarker. Adrienne even found herself, much to her surprise, quite upset by Amanda's disappearance shortly after her arrival at the school and volunteered to help her boyfriend try to locate Amanda with the use of her powers. She also took on a student, Inez Temple, as her personal assistant after expanding her fashion design company into an actual retail boutique of its own which led to the departure of her longtime personal assistant for greener pastures within the company. Despite her avoidance of friendships and alliances, Adrienne found herself becoming involved at Xavier's instead of maintaining a safe distance from situations and people.

At the same time as India was being nuked, Adrienne was finding heat being put onto her by the NYPD, who had located the killer of her husband. Adrienne begged Morgan to speak to the hitman and be sure that he wasn't going to give Adrienne's name to the authorities, but the visit was rather pointless as in the end it became clear that it was only a matter of time before the police knew everything they had to know to put Adrienne away for orchestrating Steven's death. After much cajoling and the revealing of information about being abused which Adrienne swore never to tell anyone, she was encouraged by Garrison Kane to confess her crime. The Mountie's digging into the event of the killing revealed that Steven had been involved with the mafia and had been planning on killing his wife to inherit her business. After realizing this, the FBI and NYPD offered her a deal that she would be let off on the charges in return for her compliance in helping the authorities build a case against the crime syndicate her husband had been working for at the time of his death.

Having her legal troubles resolved led to a feeling a sense of inner peace she hadn't experienced for years, and Adrienne began to work more diligently on controlling her powers. After having a psionic circuit breaker installed in her head by Professor Xavier to curtail any blackouts, she began working on meditation and mental shielding with Nathan Dayspring and Emma.

When New York was attacked by Apocolypse, Adrienne volunteered to help locate a bomb, and after some complications found that her powers were needed to help defuse said bomb. Her involvement with the X-Men led the team leader to suggest some more intensive training if she was to keep getting herself involved with the odd happenings that surrounded the mansion, and Adrienne began additional training with Jennie Stavros.

Garrison Kane's intervention in her criminal charges led Adrienne to clash with some rather uncomfortable feelings over whether she was simply grateful to the man for keeping her out of prison or whether there was something more there. Before sorting her feelings out, however, she was called on by the FBI to investigate a crime scene and discovered that Kane and three others were brutally attacked by Sabretooth. The injuries she saw through her powers left her seriously questioning whether they were still alive, and found it extremely hard to recover when they returned seemingly alive and well. Though not entirely sure she likes this new, caring person she's becoming, knowing it would be safer and more self-preserving to walk away from this involvement with the Mansion residents, Adrienne seems unable to do so because of what she's experienced and how her involvement at the Mansion has already changed her.