Frost, Emma

Emma Frost is a powerful and influential mutant telepath, most notoriously known as the White Queen of the Hellfire Club and occasional headmistress of the Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. Born to a rich Boston mercantile family, she parted ways with her family and built a financial empire with Frost International, ascending to a ruling position in the Inner Circle of the Hellfire Club. Demonstrating a particular interest in education, Frost ran the Massachusetts Academy, a preparatory school that secretly housed young mutants trained for her own interests, the Hellions.

## Emma Grace Frost

### Aliases

White Queen, Storm (mind swapped), Ice Princess (Hellfire Club exotic dancer name), Ice Queen

### Relatives

Hazel Frost (mother), Winston (father), Adrienna Frost (sister, dead), Christian Frost (brother), Cordelia Frost (sister, dead), Steven (brother-in-law), Jocasta Frost (cousin)

### Affiliation

Frost International, Inner Circle of the Hellfire Club

### Occupation

White Queen of the Hellfire Club's Inner Circle, Businesswoman, chairperson of the Board and Chief Executive of Frost International, headmistress of Massachusetts Academy, exotic dancer

## Biographical information

### Place of birth

Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America

## History

### Family Background

Emma Grace Frost was born to a Boston mercantile family, which arrived from England in the 1600s and took part in American Revolutionary War. The second of three daughters, Emma also had an older brother named Christian Frost, who had turned to substance abuse as an escape from the drudgery of his life and the abuse of their father. Unknown to their family or themselves, the three Frost sisters were mutants, whose telepathic abilities matured upon reaching their puberty. Deemed unfit in her father's eyes, Emma produced low-grade point averages and was a social outcast while attending the Snow Valley School for Girls. As a result of her emerging powers, Emma began to experience severe migraines.

Shortly after this, Emma made everyone in the school unconscious during a mental breakdown, and Charles Xavier detected her presence. Alongside Dr. Moira MacTaggart, he paid Emma's father a visit hoping she could join his school, but the whole trip revealed itself a waste of time when both Emma and her father manifested aversion to the idea.

After the emergence of her powers, Emma used them to excel in all aspects of her life. Due to a crush that Emma had on a teacher of hers, Ian Kendall, Emma decided on a future in teaching, much to her father's disapproval. Being seen kissing Mr. Kendall in front of the Frost estate, Emma's father got Kendall fired and blackmailed Emma to give up her idea of teaching. After her brother's homosexuality was revealed to the family, her father Winston Frost began to alienate Christian, resulting in his further drug abuse and attempted suicide. When it came time for their father to choose a worthy heir to the family fortune, Christian was automatically dismissed due to his drug problem and because he was gay. While the older sister, Adrienne Frost, seemed the most obvious choice, their father chose Emma. At the same time, Christian was sent to a mental institution, and Emma refused to be her father's heir, choosing to make her own way through life instead.

Emma Frost began to work minimum wage jobs and stayed at a hotel in Boston. After attempting to use her telepathy to pay for the meal with a newspaper instead of money, Frost was eventually caught and made to wash dishes, where she met Troy Killkelly, with whom she developed a relationship and moved in with. Unfortunately, Troy owed money and Frost used her telepathy at a casino to erase their financial problems, but the loan shark insisted that they owed more, for interest. Troy suggested that they pretend to kidnap Frost and have Winston pay a ransom, but Winston refused, stating that his daughter was already dead to him. After Troy was killed, Frost absorbed all of the shark's knowledge of business through her telepathy. After her sister Adrienne took Frost's kidnapping video to the news, Winston was forced to pay the ransom. However, Frost freed herself using her abilities, took the money, and moved to New York.

Frost escaped, dyed her hair blonde and enrolled into Empire State University, where she was reunited with Mr. Kendall. While attending class, Frost met a fellow telepath, Astrid Bloom, and Bloom began to train Frost in the use of her abilities. After learning that Mr. Kendall was dating her roommate, Christine McDermott, Frost confessed her love for him, and he pursued a relationship with Frost. Christine threatened to expose Mr. Kendall's relationship with students if he did not leave Frost, but Astrid influenced him to choke her. Upon learning the truth, Frost telepathically fought and defeated Astrid, absorbing all her knowledge of telepathy, and thus saving Mr. Kendall's job, revealing her mutant powers to him in the end. Despite having saved his job, Mr. Kendall left Frost in disgust upon learning that she was a mutant.

When Emma's parents found out about her powers, they sent her to a mental institution, the Essex Clinic, where she was drugged. At some point during her stay there, she was kidnapped by the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Magneto took her to Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, to use Cerebro and kill all humans, while bringing together all mutants. When the X-Men appeared, Beast created a device that shut off access to the cosmic rays of the Evolutionaries and accidentally killed two of them. With Cyclops vowing to protect mutantkind, the remaining Evolutionary reluctantly left, but not before erasing the memory of their presence from the minds of everyone and vowing to return one day. After the Evolutionaries returned Emma to the clinic, her head was clear and the drugs were out of her system, so she influenced a guard to beat everyone up and escaped the clinic.

### The Hellfire Club Beginnings

Starving in New York City, Frost ended up as a stripper for the Hellfire Club, by making men see what they wanted to see. There, she was contacted by Charles and Moira one more time to join a new team of X-Men. She was unable to recognize them, but she refused the offer once again, leading Professor X to erase her memory of the encounter, against Vulcan's judgment that Professor Xavier's doing was wrong and that he should've instead forcibly changed her mind.

One day, tired of being mistreated, she finally snapped against Sebastian Shaw, an important member of the club, and threatened to kill him. To her surprise, he proceeded to invite her to rise in the ranks and rid the club of those who were a threat to mutants. After Shaw chose Frost over two other women and brutally murdered them in front of her, their union was official.

### The White Queen

On the eve of becoming the Black King, Shaw discovered the White King, Edward Buckman, and the White Queen, Paris Seville, were creating mutant-hunting Sentinels behind his back. During an attack against the mutant members of the club, Emma Frost saw an opportunity to help Shaw's fiancée, Lourdes Chantel, escape the life of the club by making Shaw believe she had died saving him. After defeating the machines, Frost returned to the club with Shaw and mind controlled Buckman to kill everyone in the room, including his lover, Paris. To complete their take of power, Shaw strangled Buckman and became the Black King, alongside a new White Queen, Emma Frost. With that chapter closed, Frost met Chantel and sent her to Wilson Fisk (the Kingpin), so he could fix her with a new identity, leaving Frost in Fisk's debt.

Later, when Shaw was searching for a new White King, he threw a party to which he invited the most influential men in the world and tried to decide who was most fit for this position. Rejecting the candidacy of Tony Stark, he chose Prince Namor of Atlantis and invited him to join the Club. But Namor contemptuously rejected the proposal, saying that if Sebastian ever again dared to waste his time with such a minor thing, he would kill him. This drove Shaw into a frenzy, so he ordered Frost to force Namor into the Club, no matter what the cost. A few days later, she acted out a suicide by jumping overboard from a yacht to attract Namor's attention. He rescued her and they spent two weeks together in Atlantis. Shaw, however, tired of waiting for news from Frost, and thinking that Namor had killed or captured her, decided to send Sentinels to her. Sentinels attacked Namor and Frost and caused damage to Atlantis, and Namor took this as a declaration of war. After finding that, despite the Sentinels' previous attacks, Shaw was the one that deployed these ones, Frost and Namor clashed with Shaw, Pierce and Tessa. Tessa mind-wiped Frost to erase the memories of her betrayal and make her loyal to the Club again. Surrounded by two telepaths, Shaw explained to Namor that he would never get close enough to kill him. Namor left but vowed to take revenge one day.

With the continuous growth of anti-mutant sentiment, Shaw believed his regular grunts were insufficient as guards and soldiers, so Frost convinced him to open a school and fulfill her lifelong dream. Thus, was born the modern Massachusetts Academy in the Berkshire Mountains in Snow Valley, Massachusetts. During this period, Frost also began a financial empire as the majority stockholder of a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate, which was renamed Frost International after herself. Despite her youth, Frost became a chairperson of the board of Frost International and its CEO. Frost International was principally involved in transportation (both the building of ships and aircraft and their use for freight and passenger transport) and electronics.

Frost again encountered the X-Men when she attempted to recruit young mutant Kitty Pryde for her school. The Hellfire Club had hired the mercenary, Warhawk, to battle the X-Men, while leaving a device that enabled the Inner Circle of the Hellfire Club to monitor the activities of Cerebro, a mutant-detecting machine Professor X built. Professor Xavier and Frost would each approach Pryde and her parents as the heads of private schools seeking to recruit her as a talented student. Neither Professor Xavier nor Frost intended to reveal to Kitty's parents that their daughter was a mutant. Frost left after making her pitch to Carmen and Theresa Pryde, noting that whilst Carmen was in favor of her school, Theresa wasn't. As Frost was leaving Professor Xavier arrived accompanied by Storm, Wolverine and Colossus. While Kitty and the X-Men were at a malt shop, Frost ordered their capture and, while Kitty got away, Frost took the captured X-Men to Frost International. After Kitty phoned the rest of the X-Men, Frost was overpowered by the Phoenix and believed dead.

Frost actually survived, but this incident left her in a coma for a month, during which time she had to rebuild her mind from inside out, managing to remember, among other things, the memory of Namor that Tessa had taken from her.

Later, Kitty's parents reconsidered allowing her to join Xavier's School and enrolled her in the Massachusetts Academy. Frost, now fully recovered, used that opportunity to switch bodies with Storm, who had driven Kitty there, while Shaw attacked the X-Men with a new type of Sentinels. After using Frost's telepathy, Storm was able to gain her body back and the X-Men beat the Hellfire Club once again.

### The Kingpin

Around this time, Elektra began working for the Kingpin and, alongside Frost, the two would help Fisk attain his goals. Elektra (the "bad witch") would deal with the people Fisk wanted dead, while Frost (the "good witch") would deal with the honest people who needed persuasion.

One night, a young girl named Isabelle Donovan witnessed Elektra murder someone from her room. To prevent the girl from being killed, Elektra then asked Emma Frost for help in making Isabelle forget about the murder. When they got to her, however, she had already told her foster parents and they had already warned the police, resulting in a squad of corrupt cops being on their way to kill the girl, per Kingpin's orders. Felling outmatched, Frost telepathically summoned a nearby Spider-Man, and he helped Elektra defeat the policemen, while also preventing her from killing them. In the meantime, Frost got the girl to safety and arranged for her to go to England with a new identity, where she could live peacefully, away from this trouble.

### Clashing with the New Mutants

At another time, while attempting to give Shaw an important message, Frost collapsed into catatonic schizophrenia and remained in a coma, due to Mastermind. Frost eventually awoke from her coma and invited Doug Ramsey to her school, bringing her back into contact with Kitty. After capturing Kitty and Doug, Frost was unaware that Kitty and Magik shared a rapport, and the New Mutants came to their rescue. After having the New Mutants battle the Hellions, Massachusetts superhero team, Kitty caused enough chaos for Magik to teleport them all away.

During the second Secret War, Frost was among the super-villains summoned by Mephisto to battle the Beyonder.

While battling with the virtually omnipotent Beyonder, the New Mutants were killed, then removed from existence by the Beyonder and subsequently recreated by him. In being recreated, the New Mutants somehow lost much of the proficiency in using their superhuman powers that they had learned at Professor Xavier's school and became detached. Frost took advantage of this opportunity and offered Magneto her services with rehabilitating the children. Frost also had her student Empath affect Magneto's emotions of fears, insecurities, paranoia, and temperament, until he transferred all of the New Mutants, except Mirage and Warlock, to the Massachusetts Academy.

The New Mutants adjusted surprisingly well, and Frost made a lot of progress in their mental therapy, however, upon realizing the manipulation, Magneto raced to get the children back, leading Frost to warn the authorities about an impending attack to her school from the Master of Magnetism. After the New Mutants left to rescue Magneto from the Avengers (unaware of Frost's call), Frost realized they still cared for their old teacher and moved them to neutral ground, where she worked together with Magneto to cure the children of their trauma at the hands of the Beyonder. In the end, they decided to return to Xavier's school, but remained thankful for all the help Frost had given them in their time of need.

Frost encountered Magneto again, when an increase of mutant hostilities led Shaw to offer him a position in the Inner Circle, something which he was later talked into accepting by Storm, thus creating an alliance between the two rival schools.