Revisions for CnC app.
BACKGROUND:
Laura comes from the Marvel universe, which is almost identical to the 'real world' except that it is populated by all sorts of people with superpowers. Some gained their powers from science or magic, and others from genetic mutation. Laura is one of these, though indirectly in that she is a clone, and her mutation is nearly identical to Logan, the 'original' version of herself.
When a secret organization attempted to recreate the Weapon X program using a damaged sample of Wolverine's DNA, the end result was X-23, a female mutant with all of Wolverine's abilities. Weapon X had been a program to create 'super soldiers', either through genetic manipulation, physical augmentation (cybernetics) or a mix of both. While the original program had been run in Canada, this new version (called only 'the facility' was based in the US.
Laura was trained to be an assassin, had her mutant powers activated through a series of intense radiation treatments, and then had her newly manifested claws removed and laced with adamantium while under no anesthetic. The only reason the metal in her body didn't kill her was the healing factor she had inherited from Wolverine.
It was not a happy childhood, to say the least.
She was conditioned to respond to a chemical, a 'trigger scent' that would cause her to go into a berserker rage whenever she smelled it, killing anyone laced with the chemical. This was used to punish her by causing her to kill her master, the man who had been training her to fight and the only figure on the base that really treated her like a person and not a weapon. X then went on to assassinate government leaders, mob members, and anyone else that could afford the projects exorbitant fee.
Her mother, Sarah Kinney, was one of the of the project leads, along with another scientist named Xander Rice, but as X-23 got older the woman became less and less driven by the project. Laura was becoming more of a 'person' to her than a weapon, though she couldn't admit it to herself. She hated the fact that X was basically a tool, and yet when she needed to save her niece from a pedophile, she went and used Laura immediately. Something Laura was punished for afterwards by her sadistic trainer, Kimura.
The Facility was as much motivated by politics as anything other organization, and Rice had desires of taking over the facility. He had X kill the leader of the facility, and while she was supposed to kill him and his family, she couldn't kill his son, and instead let him go. When she returned to the facility she had kept a picture of the family, and her mother discovered it and realized what had happened. She decided that she was going to take X away, sneak her out of the facility and disappear.
Unfortunately, Rice laced her with the Trigger Scent that X was trained to kill. Whether he did this because he knew they were going to try and get away, or he was just being cruel is uncertain, but after they managed to make it out of the facility (X killing a lot of the members of the organization on her way out), X-23 attacked and killed her mother. As Sarah lay dying, she renamed X to 'Laura Kinney' and told her to escape.
Laura ran, escaping the Facility, after a fight with Kimura where she crushed the woman under an avalanche, and went to her aunt's home. There she met her cousin Megan, a girl she had rescued years before at her mother's insistance. She stayed there only a short time, but she adored her temporary family, and Megan's way of 'being a teenager' rubbed off on her, especially her taste in clothing.
Kimura caught up with her though, intent on bringing her back, and nearly tricked Laura into killing her new family with the Trigger Scent. Megan managed to get herself and her mother into the shower and washed it off right before Laura would have struck. Laura wiped out most of the team assaulting them, eventually cutting off her own hand and chaining Kimura to a pipe before getting her family to safety. (She blew up the house to slow Kimura down. The woman is basically invincible.)
And then she went looking for Wolverine. He was the one that had started everything, in her mind, and so if she killed him, and herself, then the Weapon X program would really be gone. After a fight where she actually managed to down him (Logan wasn't really fighting back very hard), he managed to talk her down, giving her a letter that he had been holding for her from her mother. After a run-in with Captain America, Laura was back on her own again.
(I really don't like NYX, so the description here may be a little vague.)
She ended up on the streets in New York, where she fell in with a terribly bad crowd. A pimp found her, and shortly thereafter she wound up as a torture-fetish prostitute. This lasted a few months, before one of her regular customers killed himself in front of her. She would've been gunned down by her pimp, thinking that she had killed the man and was going to draw the cops to her business, except that the time-manipulating runaway mutant named Kiden saved her. Along with another shape-shifting mutant, a mutant who could go into people's heads and control them, and a high school teacher, they managed to escape the city. Laura did not stay with them long though, migrating to 'mutant town' in New York instead.
She took odd jobs after that, one of which resulted in her murdering several anti-mutant bigots that attracted the attention of the X-men, since the kill-style looked like Wolverine. After a standard 'heroes meet and fight' she wound up tagging along with them for a few missions, including a trip to the Savage land, before she took off again. No one saw her for a while. (This was sort of ret-conned a bit since Laura acts rather out of character here and pretends she doesn't know Wolverine and never, ever tries to emulate psylocke again. The only thing that makes any sense at all is that she roomed with Shadowcat and Phoenix for a bit.)
After M-day, Laura kept her powers, and Wolverine called her back to the institute to join the newest class of X-men. It was a strange experience for her, being surrounded by people her own age, but she muddled through as best she could. She made a few friends, as well as she could, in Mercury and Dust, and developed a bit of a crush on Hellion, though she mostly just tried to ignore it.
Laura was essential in preventing the Purifiers from wiping out the mutants who had survived M-Day, impersonating Dust and making the Purifiers think they had killed the other teen, so that she was there to halt their attack on the institute. This helped her bond with her new teammates, despite the fact that they were shocked at how blatantly she killed people.
When Nimrod attacked Forge, Laura nearly died stopping the robot, injured so greatly even her healing factor couldn't save her (a point that doesn't make sense given some of the injuries she survives later, including falling into a vat of molten lava), and she only survived because Hellion used his TK to fly her across the country in seconds to be healed by Elixir.
Despite assisting greatly in saving the school, Emma Frost was intent on getting Laura to leave, and hounded her about the fact that she was a murderer, showing her visions of her dead mother to save her into leaving. When Mercury overheard this she dragged Laura from the institute to talk about something else (boys), which resulted in her being kidnapped by the Facility and Kimura. Laura and Hellion (who forced himself along), managed to go and save her, though once again Kimura survived their encounter. Laura and Julian bonded over their hunt to find Mercury, though the boy constantly tried to get her to stop killing people, which mostly didn't work.
Laura went along with the other X-men when they were hunting for the first new mutant born since M-Day, and managed to kill Lady Deathstrike, one of the worlds most dangerous assassins. She had attacked Julian during the course of their search, and Laura had been...cross with her. After Hope and Cable traveled into the future, Laura returned to the school with everyone else. However, an attack on the institute a few months later resulted in the X-men splitting up, scattering across the country. Laura would have been on her own, but she was contacted by Cyclops with an offer.
When Bastion, which was Nimrod (a robot from the future) with a human head used the Phalanx (Evil space computer virus) to revive a half-dozen of the X-men's worst enemies, Laura was recruited into a secret team called 'X-force' by Cyclops. They were going to wipe out these new enemies by any means necessary, and a tiny killing machine would be useful to have along. Laura's skills as an assassin and murderer were brought to the forefront again, and she killed many, many people during the missions with X-Force.
They managed to avert a catastrophe with the Legacy virus (a virus that kills only mutants and causes their powers to go nuts), where Laura nearly threw herself into a vat of molten metal to destroy it. She was saved by Elixir, a mutant with healing powers, who cured her of the virus...and then was so exhausted he dropped her anyway. She caught fire and was covered in burns from head to toe...but healed up after a few days.
Along with X-Force she traveled into the future to help Cable and the mutant messiah', who was a nine year old girl named Hope. Surprisingly, she bonded with the girl, perhaps because of the childs upbringing (which was harsh, though nothing like Laura's). They managed to rescue her from Cable's clone and basically save mutantkind and such, but when Cable was ready to leave Hope actually said she didn't want to leave 'Laura and Josh (Elixir)', and struggled to get away. But it didn't matter, and Laura wouldn't see her again for years, by Hope's reckoning. By the time she returned to the past, the friendship appeared to be gone.
Laura moved to San Fransciso with the rest of the mutant population after the Mayor of that city invited them there, and as things got bad and HAMMER (a new national security agency run by villains) came after them, she was on the front lines fighting against the enemies when the mutants moved out into the bay and brought Magneto's old base, "Asteroid M' up from the bottom of the ocean. She fought Dakan, a 'fake Wolverine', along with Pixie and Armor.
When Cable and Hope returned to the present, Basion sent an army after them, and Laura assisted in keeping them safe during their trip to Asteroid M, which had been renamed Utopia. When the island, and the nearby city were cut off from the rest of the country so that Bastion could invade them with an army of Sentinals from the future (more Nimrod's), Laura was on the front lines fighting them, and had to watch her friend Julian lose his hands to the battle.
She stayed with him as he recovered, but only for a short time, as X-Force was sent to the future (more time travel! yay!) to cut off the flow of Nimrod Robots that were attacking them. They were successful, but Laura seered off a lot of her skin trying to get back through the portal to the present, since 'someone had to try' and she could heal. She, along with the rest of X-Force, were saved by Cable sacrificing himself to bring them home.
With the threat of Bastion and his revived-cohorts gone, Wolverine kicked Laura off of X-Force. He told her that he wasn't going to let her be a murderer anymore, and that she wasn't allowed to take orders from him or Cyclops that would have her do that. He told her that she had to decide what she wanted to do herself from now on. She admitted she had no idea how to do that, and he told her that was a good start and left on her own.
But Laura's bond with most of her original teammates had faded during her time with X-Force, aside from her friendship/crush on Julian and her friendship with Dust, and she didn't really have any other connections to the X-men beyond them. She'd never really been 'friends' with her X-Force compatriots (except Josh), so she had no connection with any of them either. She was left trying to figure out what to do with her life, pretty much on her own.
A few days later, still trying to figure out what she could possibly want to do, she ends up in the City....
Laura comes from the Marvel universe, which is almost identical to the 'real world' except that it is populated by all sorts of people with superpowers. Some gained their powers from science or magic, and others from genetic mutation. Laura is one of these, though indirectly in that she is a clone, and her mutation is nearly identical to Logan, the 'original' version of herself.
When a secret organization attempted to recreate the Weapon X program using a damaged sample of Wolverine's DNA, the end result was X-23, a female mutant with all of Wolverine's abilities. Weapon X had been a program to create 'super soldiers', either through genetic manipulation, physical augmentation (cybernetics) or a mix of both. While the original program had been run in Canada, this new version (called only 'the facility' was based in the US.
Laura was trained to be an assassin, had her mutant powers activated through a series of intense radiation treatments, and then had her newly manifested claws removed and laced with adamantium while under no anesthetic. The only reason the metal in her body didn't kill her was the healing factor she had inherited from Wolverine.
It was not a happy childhood, to say the least.
She was conditioned to respond to a chemical, a 'trigger scent' that would cause her to go into a berserker rage whenever she smelled it, killing anyone laced with the chemical. This was used to punish her by causing her to kill her master, the man who had been training her to fight and the only figure on the base that really treated her like a person and not a weapon. X then went on to assassinate government leaders, mob members, and anyone else that could afford the projects exorbitant fee.
Her mother, Sarah Kinney, was one of the of the project leads, along with another scientist named Xander Rice, but as X-23 got older the woman became less and less driven by the project. Laura was becoming more of a 'person' to her than a weapon, though she couldn't admit it to herself. She hated the fact that X was basically a tool, and yet when she needed to save her niece from a pedophile, she went and used Laura immediately. Something Laura was punished for afterwards by her sadistic trainer, Kimura.
The Facility was as much motivated by politics as anything other organization, and Rice had desires of taking over the facility. He had X kill the leader of the facility, and while she was supposed to kill him and his family, she couldn't kill his son, and instead let him go. When she returned to the facility she had kept a picture of the family, and her mother discovered it and realized what had happened. She decided that she was going to take X away, sneak her out of the facility and disappear.
Unfortunately, Rice laced her with the Trigger Scent that X was trained to kill. Whether he did this because he knew they were going to try and get away, or he was just being cruel is uncertain, but after they managed to make it out of the facility (X killing a lot of the members of the organization on her way out), X-23 attacked and killed her mother. As Sarah lay dying, she renamed X to 'Laura Kinney' and told her to escape.
Laura ran, escaping the Facility, after a fight with Kimura where she crushed the woman under an avalanche, and went to her aunt's home. There she met her cousin Megan, a girl she had rescued years before at her mother's insistance. She stayed there only a short time, but she adored her temporary family, and Megan's way of 'being a teenager' rubbed off on her, especially her taste in clothing.
Kimura caught up with her though, intent on bringing her back, and nearly tricked Laura into killing her new family with the Trigger Scent. Megan managed to get herself and her mother into the shower and washed it off right before Laura would have struck. Laura wiped out most of the team assaulting them, eventually cutting off her own hand and chaining Kimura to a pipe before getting her family to safety. (She blew up the house to slow Kimura down. The woman is basically invincible.)
And then she went looking for Wolverine. He was the one that had started everything, in her mind, and so if she killed him, and herself, then the Weapon X program would really be gone. After a fight where she actually managed to down him (Logan wasn't really fighting back very hard), he managed to talk her down, giving her a letter that he had been holding for her from her mother. After a run-in with Captain America, Laura was back on her own again.
(I really don't like NYX, so the description here may be a little vague.)
She ended up on the streets in New York, where she fell in with a terribly bad crowd. A pimp found her, and shortly thereafter she wound up as a torture-fetish prostitute. This lasted a few months, before one of her regular customers killed himself in front of her. She would've been gunned down by her pimp, thinking that she had killed the man and was going to draw the cops to her business, except that the time-manipulating runaway mutant named Kiden saved her. Along with another shape-shifting mutant, a mutant who could go into people's heads and control them, and a high school teacher, they managed to escape the city. Laura did not stay with them long though, migrating to 'mutant town' in New York instead.
She took odd jobs after that, one of which resulted in her murdering several anti-mutant bigots that attracted the attention of the X-men, since the kill-style looked like Wolverine. After a standard 'heroes meet and fight' she wound up tagging along with them for a few missions, including a trip to the Savage land, before she took off again. No one saw her for a while. (This was sort of ret-conned a bit since Laura acts rather out of character here and pretends she doesn't know Wolverine and never, ever tries to emulate psylocke again. The only thing that makes any sense at all is that she roomed with Shadowcat and Phoenix for a bit.)
After M-day, Laura kept her powers, and Wolverine called her back to the institute to join the newest class of X-men. It was a strange experience for her, being surrounded by people her own age, but she muddled through as best she could. She made a few friends, as well as she could, in Mercury and Dust, and developed a bit of a crush on Hellion, though she mostly just tried to ignore it.
Laura was essential in preventing the Purifiers from wiping out the mutants who had survived M-Day, impersonating Dust and making the Purifiers think they had killed the other teen, so that she was there to halt their attack on the institute. This helped her bond with her new teammates, despite the fact that they were shocked at how blatantly she killed people.
When Nimrod attacked Forge, Laura nearly died stopping the robot, injured so greatly even her healing factor couldn't save her (a point that doesn't make sense given some of the injuries she survives later, including falling into a vat of molten lava), and she only survived because Hellion used his TK to fly her across the country in seconds to be healed by Elixir.
Despite assisting greatly in saving the school, Emma Frost was intent on getting Laura to leave, and hounded her about the fact that she was a murderer, showing her visions of her dead mother to save her into leaving. When Mercury overheard this she dragged Laura from the institute to talk about something else (boys), which resulted in her being kidnapped by the Facility and Kimura. Laura and Hellion (who forced himself along), managed to go and save her, though once again Kimura survived their encounter. Laura and Julian bonded over their hunt to find Mercury, though the boy constantly tried to get her to stop killing people, which mostly didn't work.
Laura went along with the other X-men when they were hunting for the first new mutant born since M-Day, and managed to kill Lady Deathstrike, one of the worlds most dangerous assassins. She had attacked Julian during the course of their search, and Laura had been...cross with her. After Hope and Cable traveled into the future, Laura returned to the school with everyone else. However, an attack on the institute a few months later resulted in the X-men splitting up, scattering across the country. Laura would have been on her own, but she was contacted by Cyclops with an offer.
When Bastion, which was Nimrod (a robot from the future) with a human head used the Phalanx (Evil space computer virus) to revive a half-dozen of the X-men's worst enemies, Laura was recruited into a secret team called 'X-force' by Cyclops. They were going to wipe out these new enemies by any means necessary, and a tiny killing machine would be useful to have along. Laura's skills as an assassin and murderer were brought to the forefront again, and she killed many, many people during the missions with X-Force.
They managed to avert a catastrophe with the Legacy virus (a virus that kills only mutants and causes their powers to go nuts), where Laura nearly threw herself into a vat of molten metal to destroy it. She was saved by Elixir, a mutant with healing powers, who cured her of the virus...and then was so exhausted he dropped her anyway. She caught fire and was covered in burns from head to toe...but healed up after a few days.
Along with X-Force she traveled into the future to help Cable and the mutant messiah', who was a nine year old girl named Hope. Surprisingly, she bonded with the girl, perhaps because of the childs upbringing (which was harsh, though nothing like Laura's). They managed to rescue her from Cable's clone and basically save mutantkind and such, but when Cable was ready to leave Hope actually said she didn't want to leave 'Laura and Josh (Elixir)', and struggled to get away. But it didn't matter, and Laura wouldn't see her again for years, by Hope's reckoning. By the time she returned to the past, the friendship appeared to be gone.
Laura moved to San Fransciso with the rest of the mutant population after the Mayor of that city invited them there, and as things got bad and HAMMER (a new national security agency run by villains) came after them, she was on the front lines fighting against the enemies when the mutants moved out into the bay and brought Magneto's old base, "Asteroid M' up from the bottom of the ocean. She fought Dakan, a 'fake Wolverine', along with Pixie and Armor.
When Cable and Hope returned to the present, Basion sent an army after them, and Laura assisted in keeping them safe during their trip to Asteroid M, which had been renamed Utopia. When the island, and the nearby city were cut off from the rest of the country so that Bastion could invade them with an army of Sentinals from the future (more Nimrod's), Laura was on the front lines fighting them, and had to watch her friend Julian lose his hands to the battle.
She stayed with him as he recovered, but only for a short time, as X-Force was sent to the future (more time travel! yay!) to cut off the flow of Nimrod Robots that were attacking them. They were successful, but Laura seered off a lot of her skin trying to get back through the portal to the present, since 'someone had to try' and she could heal. She, along with the rest of X-Force, were saved by Cable sacrificing himself to bring them home.
With the threat of Bastion and his revived-cohorts gone, Wolverine kicked Laura off of X-Force. He told her that he wasn't going to let her be a murderer anymore, and that she wasn't allowed to take orders from him or Cyclops that would have her do that. He told her that she had to decide what she wanted to do herself from now on. She admitted she had no idea how to do that, and he told her that was a good start and left on her own.
But Laura's bond with most of her original teammates had faded during her time with X-Force, aside from her friendship/crush on Julian and her friendship with Dust, and she didn't really have any other connections to the X-men beyond them. She'd never really been 'friends' with her X-Force compatriots (except Josh), so she had no connection with any of them either. She was left trying to figure out what to do with her life, pretty much on her own.
A few days later, still trying to figure out what she could possibly want to do, she ends up in the City....