Pauline Guinevere Thornton, A.K.A. "Gwen Thornton" A.K.A., "Deaths Head": The Argent Specter of Dayton, Ohio.

Gwen Thornton was OBSESSED with The Shroud of Argentium from the time she was just 6 years old. Her dying grandma, Maybelline Thornton, pressed the scrap of it which had been given to her by her own father, Perry Richard Thornton, who had picked it up at the Battlefield where The Shroud of Argentium died, while whispering the words in Gwen's ear, "Keep it secret, keep it safe: don't let them find it," with her last dying breath that year. Her grandma had a good reason to worry, because the once-torn edges of the scrap of silver fabric no bigger than a very large postage stamp had recently begun to even themselves out and a hem had formed along the outer surface while she watched just earlier that morning.

By the time Gwen was in highschool, the shroud had fully recovered, and she was having dreams of "The Silver Eyes" telling her to become a superheroine, and offering her friends and even lovers if she would only help those in need with her gifts. Knowing well enough to realize that refusing the call would only likely get her friends and family members hurt or even killed, she went to the local stores "costumes section" around Halloween and bought a bunch of products from them alleging she was "feeling indecisive" about what she wanted to wear that year and she assembled from those items, some craft paints, a bunch of other random scrap fabrics and metal, plus various techniques and things she learned on the Internet: a costume for crime-fighting. One of its key features was a silver with black accents and patterns gas mask styled like a skull with two air-filtering canisters mounted on either side of the jaw where the small gap between the back teeth and the joint of the jawbone is, plus another one "underneath" the jawbone and a fourth that entered at the back of the neck hidden inside the "Spine".

This actually caused some confusion initially, as the media thought she was a new supervillain muscling in on the territory of the local community of supervillain gang leaders and/or trying to carve out her own territory for herself. Interestingly, she was contacted several times when "out on patrol" by would-be members of "The Silver Skulls" (a name that some vid-loger on Thou-Tube made up out of whole cloth for her alleged gang), and actually recruited five of them she decided she could easily redeem as her "henchmen"; but then quickly revealed back at the "Secret Lair" (basically just randomly selected abandoned buildings) that they weren't going to be henchmen at all, but rather sidekicks or apprentice heroes/heroines.

This also created her arch-enemy, "Skull-King", who was implacable in his refusal to be "redeemed" and actually started actively recruiting REAL "Silver Skulls" gangsters out of fury at "having been duped" by this "fake supervillainess". Everyone in the city is also totally aware he's also kinda her biggest fan, to the level of full-scale "Stalker Fan" mode, (especially the members of the gang), and he is really more-so still pissed off even years later that she blatantly rejected his amorous advances when she made her offer to redeem him as a new sidekick, which almost instantly bloomed into a twisted and delusional mixture of love and hatred that is even now still growing stronger where he sees every battle they have as some twisted kind of a "date" between the two of them, or, more recently, "a relationship outing" between her and her new superhero boyfriend and Skull-King's own trio of equally insane supervillainess girlfriends who are ALSO this same type of stalker-fans for her that he is. (The CDC & SCP foundation are both DEEPLY concerned about that last part, but consider it low priority for the moment, worth monitoring as best they can with their resources stretched so tightly, but not more than that...)

However, after she didn't really do anything blatantly criminal, (okay, yes, she got a little band of "Henchmen", sure, but they didn't actually do any robberies or anything else like that), and then they started foiling other gangs heists and not just stealing the take but returning it instead, people decided that she was really exactly what she said she was, a Superheroine with a kinda morbid obsession with being an heiress to the long-dead hero "The Shroud of Argentium" and a sort of "Memento Mori" theme for her costume.

Now at 21 she's attending Sinclair Community College and still an active part of the local superheroes scene, with a publicist and everything, plus she's taken over one of those old abandoned buildings she used to pretend was her "secret lair" and turned it into an actual superhero headquarters for her and her team. They're definitely not a "First string" group, but they're not really trying to be, mostly just helping with disaster relief during flooding/tornado season and sometimes odd-jobs that need a superheroic touch, playing backup to Dayton's heavier hitters, or jigging with the local community of super-criminals whenever they decide to get violent about someone else who doesn't have powers getting arrested for things that person definitely actually did by the police department. The rest of the time they are more about community health and development outreach and providing a safe place for the local youths to hang out when they are having issues at home or something else like that.

In terms of her powers, her variant of the shroud appears to grant her a significant improvement in mental flexibility and instincts for mechanical systems, including both building and repairs: a body that is "Peak human" in nearly all fields except for damage resistance and restoration, where she's distinctly trans-human, being able to shrug off a direct Cannonball impact to her nose unscathed, and healing after being stabbed in the gut in a matter of forty minutes or less, although she's only been injured that much one time when "She-Skull" (one of those crazy women mentioned earlier who's "dating" her and actually dating Skull-King) stabbed her with a "Cupids Arrow" on Valentine's Day last year. (She Skull has superhuman strength, among other powers.)

Her shroud doesn't grant invisibility, but she's used her superhuman intelligence and training as a gagetier to make a "blinker belt" which causes her to flicker in-and-out of synchrony with normal reality making her sort-of invisible, like trying to track someone in the blinking light of a strobe at a rave party or something similar, and also allowing her to "phase" through thin walls or similar obstacles.

****'s Head's favorite/signature weapons are a pair of silver-plated fighting daggers which have been in her family along the female line for more than seven generations. Allegedly, they were actually a gift from the bearer of The Shroud of Argentium during the colonial era in recompense for her distant ancestors hiding him from some mysterious deer-skulled bipedal abomination while he was wounded.

In terms of her relationship with the rest of the Argent Specters, she is cordial with most of them she's met, but doesn't keep close contact with the overall majority of the other bearers: really, the only ones she talks to at-all regularly are the ones in Ohio and a few who are nearby in Indiana. Mostly this stems from the lack of support she got from the other Specters during her initial problems with the Media.