Freezing

Freezing
Tracy freezes a flower.
Originally held by:	Tracy Strauss
Absorbed by:	Sylar
Ability to:	Lower the temperature of matter
Examples of freezing

Freezing is the ability to reduce the temperature of matter, causing it to freeze.

Characters

• Tracy Strauss has this ability, though it was granted synthetically.
• Sylar stole this ability from an unspecified victim, but lost it after being infected by the Shanti virus.

Limits

In Don't Look Back, James Walker was found frozen solid, mid-bite. In Road Kill, Sylar managed to coat a large stretch of highway with ice in seconds. These events indicate that he can rapidly freeze a human body or cause hundreds of cubic feet of ice to form from ambient moisture in seconds.

In The Butterfly Effect, Tracy, enraged, freezes a reporter causing him to shatter into a bunch of ice shards.

The range of this ability appears to be quite short. Sylar did not have to have physical contact with the roadway in order to freeze it — he merely pointed his hand at the asphalt — but he did have to open the door and lean down from the cab.

Examples

• 
  James Walker is frozen while eating cereal in his home.
  (Don't Look Back)
• 
  In an unaired scene, a cop guarding Molly at FBI Headquarters is found frozen, his right arm so brittle it has shattered into pieces.
  (One Giant Leap)
• 
  Sylar freezes part of I-95, causing pursuing police cars to crash.
  (Road Kill)
• 
  Sylar and Peter face off. In a creative mirroring of old western movies, Sylar's hands turn to ice at his will, where Peter's ignite flame.
  (Five Years Gone)
• 
  To simulate a snow globe for his mother, Sylar freezes water from a sink spray-nozzle to form snow.
  (The Hard Part)
• 
  After grabbing Hiro's sword, Sylar freezes it...
• 
  ...breaking it in half.
  (The Hard Part)
• 
  Tracy freezes a DC reporter...
• 
  ...who cracks...
• 
  ...and shatters into pieces.
  (The Butterfly Effect)
• 
  Tracy freezes a rose...
• 
  ...until its petals drop and crack.
  (One of Us, One of Them)

Notes

• Jason Badower, creator of the graphic novel Road Kill, said he didn't want Sylar's freezing power to look like Iceman from the X-Men.

"A beam of ice never made any sense to me and wouldn't look right in the Heroes world. I figured that the air around his hands would simply just get really, really cold rather than a beam of ice shoot out of his hands. I figured he could then extend and direct the coldness around his hands towards the road (I couldn't get him leaning out and touching the road -- how would he steer the semi?!). But where does the water come from that forms the ice? Is it the oxygen in the air slowing down? Should I have drawn the ground wet from rain? Given that there was no direction for the latter in the script, I opted for the former. So my comic implies that he could freeze someone from a short distance (3 feet?)."

• Assuming that Mohinder's list of Sylar's victims was complete at the time he reported it (Fallout), the freezing ability was probably obtained either from the victim described as "David" (Turning Point), from one of the two unnamed victims whose photos Mr. Bennet shows to Eden (Homecoming), or from another unrevealed victim.
• A number of fans have speculated that Sylar obtained this ability from James Walker. However, James appears to have been frozen mid-bite, which would mean he was frozen while still alive. It is extremely unlikely that Sylar was able to steal this ability from James and use it on him all in the span of a single bite.
• It is unknown if "freezing" refers to the unconfirmed ability "temperature manipulation" mentioned by the assignment tracker map.

Fan Theories

Please refer to Theory:Freezing for fan-created theories and other speculation.