[KittsMitts] Katherine Anne Pryde {X-Men}

General Information

Full Name:
Katherine "Kitty" Pryde
Codename or Alias:
Shadowcat, previously Ariel and Sprite
Anonymity:
Out and Proud as an X-Man and Professor of the Xavier School - Her alias Shadowcat specifically is not overly known outside of mutant circles, but she's been through enough publicly to know she can't hide it if someone does try and find it.
Gender:
Female
Race:
Mutant
Age:
24
Place Of Birth:
Deerfield, IL
Occupation/Status:
Professor and Counselor at Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters
Alignment:
Hero
Factions:
X-Men
Canon Or Original?:
Canon


Powers/Abilities:

Intangibility
Kitty Pryde is the master of Intangibility. While this power used to present a huge problem for her, she no longer involuntarily phases. She has learned to use her non-combative power combatively, and continues to innovate. Sometimes this is called Spirit Walking or Phasing.

Levitation/Air Walking
She discovered her ability to levitate her body and phase other people and objects around the same time, after about a year and a half of training with Professor Xavier. This has progressed into full-blown air walking, relying on being just tangible enough to interact with the air.

Hand-to-Hand/Judo training
While she learned hand to hand for years at the school, she did dip out for private lessons with Logan.

Computer Science/Physics knowledge
This is one of her areas of specialty. While she is gifted in all things science, the science of how things work is her absolute favorite. She had an interest before, but with her physics-defying power, it became a love. She has two bachelor's in Physics and Computer Science, and her master's in Computer Science. Her current specialties and passions lie in every branch of cutting edge technology she can research, particularly Software Engineering and Nanotechnology. Being intangible, Kitty can be very precise even without the use of special tools.

Very High Intellect
She's had a genius-level IQ since childhood, and being surrounded by extremely intelligent older minds certainly didn't hurt. She's always been study-minded. Her intelligence was marked at least five years beyond her physical age when she was young, and has grown exponentially since.

She also did ballet and gymnastics all throughout her childhood, even through much of her time at the school, though the application of those skills shifted once she was 13 and joined the team.

 Weapons/Items:
Not really anything specific or unchanging. She tends to improvise, and can wield a number of weapons efficiently – particularly short swords, knives, and handguns.


Appearance


Physical Appearance:
Kitty is slight, short, and spunky. Standing at *5'6" on a good day (*see: 5'4", just in 2 inch heels), she's not the shortest anymore, but her 110 lb frame hardly lets that matter. She has ballerina proportions, which helped her love of it. Her recently re-implemented strict training regimen keeps her in as peak physical form as an intangible girl can manage. Oh nooo, the weight phased right through my hand, I guess I'd better call it a day. On the bright side, she never really needs a spotter.
Her skin is a healthy and bright peach tone, paler when she goes through heavy research phases. Her eyes are very doe-like and blue, her nose button-cute, and her mouth small-set and pouty when it isn't smiling brightly. Her cheekbones, jawline, and chin are all particularly strong, noticeable features. She often keeps her midback-length chocolate brown hair in a slightly-frizzy ponytail for convenience, especially when in the field. Not noticing someone before they grab your hair will slow you down, even if they can't keep you there. Her hair grows fast, so she goes through phases of different cuts. They all grow out quickly enough that the haircut time seems to breeze by and she ends up back at long hair before she knows it.




Clothing and Armor:
Heavy on the casual side of business-casual, but still typically pretty modest - she feels she needs to be, working at a school. She considers herself pretty fashionable, usually ranging from comfy but fitted fits, to full on vintage or campy statement pieces. She likes pretty things and cool things, nothing wrong with that. She does sometimes go for more practical and edgy styles, but since she lives on campus, they're less often her go-to's in her age of Professor-ship. Dress for the job you want and all that, so she dresses for the job she's trying to do the best right now. She's still young and likes feeling personable, so while she's professional she also prefers feeling a little more down to Earth so the students find her easier to talk to. She's not 100% certain this works, but she WILL go all out when the occasion calls for it. She's never let it be said she didn't know how to dress for an occasion.
As for costumes, dear lord has she gone through the works. She had... some very wild tastes when she was younger. But what she eventually settled on for her version of the X-uniform was akin to a ballet leotard for her yellow panel amid the black bodysuit. She does still belt at top of the hips, more for the pockets than aesthetic. Her shoulder panels raise slightly off of the main suit, creating a yellow V shape cutting through the black. She typically wears yellow gloves as well, and black boots with yellow accents that blend in with the main suit.



Personality
Bad Habits:
Where to begin? First, it's in the name. Prideful, Volatile, Rash, Stubborn, Unyielding, known to be Self-Sacrificial to a fault. She hopes she's shed her childish label by now. Sarcastic at inappropriate times. Drinks away her problems when the world gets too heavy and full of death and sorrow. For someone with a non-combative power, she has a combative personality. One thing is always clear: She is in charge. Of herself, and of you if you can't handle it. Her fatal flaw is definitely hubris, and her need to do it all herself so it'll be done properly runs rampant if not unchecked. Aaand she does not always immediately take kindly to being checked.

Sexual Orientation:
Bisexual


General Personality:
One thing that can be linked to Kitty Pryde, negatively or positively, is identity politics. She proudly identifies herself when asked as a Jewish Bisexual Mutant Woman. She celebrates differences, and will speak on her own to anyone who wants to know. However, she knows when to put these aside and when to bring them to the forefront. She's very sensitive to injustice, and fights to make the unjust just. She is upfront about who she is because "if we're going to have a problem, I'd like to know." She doesn't have qualms about calling someone out for saying something shitty, but that doesn't mean she's unforgiving. She's forgiven more than not. And if you're truly remorseful, hell, why wouldn't she forgive you. She's not a bad person. Kitty Pryde is good. In every sense of the word.

Kitty Pryde is also great at a lot of things, and has appropriate confidence to go with it. While she has her moments of self-doubt, she manages to bring herself back with her very strong sense of self. She is currently in a bit of a turbulent place. She's fresh out of grad school, at a pretty new job (though she's basically been doing it since she was 13), and a bit caught between worlds. She left the mansion for a few years, only returning when they needed her, but now she's back at her true home of 7 straight years as more than a visitor. Part of her wants to be a full-time superhero, always in the field saving the world. Part of her truly cares for this new generation and wants to be there for them because she knows how scary things were for her being thrown into this world so young. Part of her just wants to experience her twenties like any normal human girl, though she's long accepted being anything but normal. She has security available if she wants it, but imagines what she could do without the restrictions security requires. Two years slaving over textbooks and research papers was hardly the post-21st world people talked about. She's stuck between wanting all of the responsibility and none of it. So she makes some reckless decisions, has some fun adventures, and comes back to work like most people fresh out of college? Is this the mundane life she craves? Does it make a difference if the adventures are life-and-death? Kitty Pryde's quarter-life crisis is in full-swing, but if her past has taught her one thing, it's that she can make it through anything.

Anything Else
Face Claim: Natalia Dyer


Character's History

Siblings:
N/A
Mother:
Theresa "Terri" Pryde
Father:
Carmen Pryde
Other Family:
None alive.

History:

While Katherine "Kitty" Pryde was never quite normal, there was a time when she was just another gifted and talented nerd kid, an example to boomers of millennials' obsession with technology, as well as a testament to how easy access to knowledge could only help the youth flourish sooner. She never really understood the demonizing of technological advancement. Even as she adored the movie Wall-E, the problems with that didn't come from technology, but from those in power lying to the masses. Society was still thriving, just evolving in a different direction. She had the best grades, and honestly would rarely settle for anything less.

Kitty's life changed when she turned thirteen, though not right away. It started with headaches. Figuring it was just part of puberty, she didn't really talk about it. Migraines or worse would plague her daily. Eventually, one night she woke up in the middle of the night in her basement with no recollection of going down there. From that point on, Kitty's mutation had shown itself unbeknownst to her and she started showing up on mutant scanning systems. Finally, one day she awoke in her bed and, half-asleep, started to phase through her bed. She screamed, panic, but she went down so fast the sound disappeared into the floor and wall she traveled through until the air was allowed to escape again as she landed roughly in the basement again, suddenly realizing what the weeks of apparent sleepwalking had been. She screamed and sobbed, pounding on the basement door that she had locked to keep herself out of it until her mother and father could come get her. When she was finally calm enough to explain what happened, her parents exchanged a solemn look, and told her they'd received a call just that morning. A call from The Massachusetts Academy, specifically from a Ms. Emma Frost.

Emma Frost was there in her house the next day, and the traumatized and confused Kitty was having trouble grasping what was going on. She was a mutant. Why? How? Her parents weren't mutants. Why was she the first? What was wrong with her? It didn't help that the woman there to recruit her was cold and matter-of-fact. She wouldn't have trusted her even if it hadn't been not long enough since her awakening. Emma was seen off, told that they would consider her offer, and give her a call within the week. Two days later, Charles Xavier paid a visit to his old war buddy, Carmen Pryde.

With Charles was another young mutant named Jean Grey. She was 17, only four years older than Kitty, and also under Professor X's tutelage as a telekinetic mutant. With the cooloff period, her father's trust in Charles, and Jean's understanding nature helping them click quickly, the choice was clear. Kitty Pryde chose Charles Xavier's Academy for Gifted Youngsters in upstate New York.

Not really knowing how, she let her parents let down Emma Frost, and, unbeknownst to her, The Hellfire Society. Angered and still determined to get a young, moldable, genius mutant on their side, The Hellfire Society attacked the X Mansion the day Kitty moved in. Her bags weren't even unpacked when she was witness to the other x-men being kidnapped, and in a moment of desperation, stowed away on the same plane. They were taken to the site of the Massachusetts Academy, shocking young Kitty Pryde yet again. It was there that she truly learned that she was in a school of superheroes, the X-Men. They were so small and new, she'd barely heard of them and hadn't thought they were real. And The Hellfire Society? THIS was almost the mutant world she was brought into instead? Determined, young Kitty was always best under pressure. She managed to sneak through most security and smuggle the X-men out, finally able to activate her powers on her own through the effort. This ended her headaches, and earned her a place among the X-men, who had previously been worried that she was far too young for the hero half of the school.


The X-men's discomfort with putting an apparent child in danger still persisted, but once they figured out Kitty would stow away anyways, they stopped being quite so forceful about barring her from missions. She was officially a student, and spent half of her time being taught in regular school subjects, and the other half rapidly gaining control of her powers and learning teamwork and leadership skills. Her academic loves of physics, math, and computers were her primary focus in that category of her life, while she gave Charles a real mental workout trying to figure out how to truly challenge her in the danger room without her simple being able to phase through the entire room.

Now that she was an official X-man, she needed a codename. Charles suggested Ariel after the Tempest character, who often became intangible and invisible. But as it was post-Disney's Little Mermaid fame, Kitty tested and rejected the codename rather quickly. The one she settled on to start was suggested by Storm. For years, Kitty Pryde was known as Sprite in the field. During her time as Sprite, she was first visited by a purple dragon named Lockheed, who helped her get out of a tight spot against the Morlocks. Lockheed would continue to show up periodically throughout her life. Though she was taking college-level courses at 14 and graduated high school at 16, Charles always made sure Kitty had time to be a kid, paying for ballet lessons and allowing her plenty of time to make friends outside of the mention, like her best friend of the human persuasion, Doug Ramsey. Another ever-changing thing Kitty became known for was her costume. Though she started in the classes X-men yellow and black, she branched out in colors, patterns, and footwear quite often.
Kitty's relationships with her teammates, roommates, and everything in between began to develop over the years. She was particularly attached to Jean, Scott, Peter, and Illyana as friends, and Ororo as an older mentor. When Kitty turned 15, she learned her parents were getting a divorce. In a world where she was fighting monsters and mutants, and her best friend had suddenly aged five years, such a normal issue really hit Kitty hard. She was given a choice between her parents, and chose instead to stay at the Academy. She would visit her parents, but the X Mansion was officially her home. It was the first time she'd seen a relationship that close to her, let alone a marriage, shatter. And it just had to be her parents. But it wouldn't be the last. One thing Kitty hated more than anything was when she didn't understand something. She was a genius, she'd been told as much since she was very young. So why did this have to happen when it didn't make any sense to her?

As a result, she stopped visiting her parents so often, and prolonged exposure to her home and family had unexpected, but welcome results. Though not without challenge and ingrained prejudice, she quickly overcame her unease around mutants with more outward characteristics, such as Kurt Wagner, and became surprisingly good friends with Logan, who took time to teach her to fight as an almost parental-figure, since her parents still didn't know about her being a hero. (She did tell them on her eighteenth birthday, when they could no longer do anything about it.)

At fifteen she changed her codename to Ariel for a time, thinking Sprite was too young for her now. At 17, her final and most well-known codename came to be, with the help of Logan during a very eventful involuntary trip to Japan. She met a horrifying family led by a man who turned into a monster named Terror who sapped her ability to control her powers to mold her into what they wanted her to be. She spent the year between 16 and 17 there, banishing a darkness that had been forced upon her, and having to relearn control from the ground up. She became Shadowcat, and remains so to this day.


Upon her return to the states, Kitty didn't feel right in the mansion. She took some time in England, reunited with Lockheed. She kept returning, and eventually decided she needed to do something for her and follow her own path. She decided to get her degrees. She tested out of a ridiculous amount of credits due to her education at Xavier's, plus her personal interests and academic talents. She graduated in two years with honors, and graduated grad school in one. She has two masters degrees in the programs of Computer Engineering and Systems, and Device Science and Nanotechnology. Hence, she was gone from the school for three full years, except for emergencies and holidays. She returned to the school officially when she was 22, and began to help with a new generation of students that she'd previously rejected. They were called The New Mutants, though she affectionately and teasingly calls them X-Babies still.

Professor Pryde (Professor Kitty to the kids) takes her job seriously, though she also considers herself a full-time superhero because of the school where she happens to teach. She sometimes wishes she could focus more on her passions outside of the X-men, like computer technological advancement and nanotechnology, which were the subject of her thesis in school. She knows she could do more, but whenever she stops to think about it, she always comes back to the X-men. What she's doing here is important, more important than what she could be doing anywhere else. That thought is one of the strongest that comforts her when she thinks of the uncertain future.


Role Play Sample:


"OH, oh! Take that, beat you again!"

A tinny voice piped up from behind the feature game of the small town mall arcade. A puff of frizzy, curly hair over a shoulder in a striped sweater could be seen to the right of the machine, where from the other side poked out a blonde coiff and a much wider shoulder in a jean jacket.

"Hey, look at that! You got such a high score it won't fit on the screen anymore!" The other voice exclaimed, arm lifting to point at the screen. Circling around, two fifteen year olds were staring at the flashing high score screen in awe. As they stared, the flashing became more erratic, and they took a step back just before the screen fizzled.

"Uhhh... weren't there at least four more levels?"

"According to the forums, yes."

"Aw, crap."

"Hey, you kids! Did you break another machine!? I swear this is the last time I let you in here!" The owner of the arcade reared his balding, portly head over the prize counter, starting to make his way around. "I can't afford to fix a machine you break after four quarters every time!"

"Aw, man. Mr. Patucci, don't be mad, I can fix it myself! You won't even have to pay me, honest," The slight girl piped up, coming around the machine to face the short, stocky man. Doug, seeing the look in the man's eyes, put a wary hand on his friend's shoulder.

"No! That's IT! I don't wanna hear anything from you high and mighty kids anymore, and I'm sick of seeing you around here, driving off customers who want to play the machine you take up for hours! You two are BANNED!" The man was growing increasingly redfaced as he continued to charge around the counter, causing the two kids to bolt out of the front doors with a chorus of 'sorries.'

"Rats, Doug. That's the fifth arcade we've been kicked out of. We're gonna run out of good spots," The young girl lamented once they'd stopped to catch their breath, but her face betrayed her glee. She finally started to laugh, and found that she couldn't stop. The young boy laughed with her, and together they laughed all the way to their usual park by their usual bus stop.

"I dunno, Kitty. We fix enough of those, we could just run our own when they get rid of all the ones we break," said Doug Ramsey, with a wicked teasing grin on his face. He laughed loudly when he got a light elbow to the ribs.

"In your dreams, Ramsey." Katherine Pryde returned his wicked grin with one of her own before they collapsed into giggles, laying down next to each other on the park bench and laughing until dark.

-------------



"God, they're all so flashy these days."

Two adults walked into a mashed bowling alley, arcade, and laser tag spot. One wasn't enough to keep a place going these days. This one even served alcohol, which was always a plus. The girl was a brunette, with curly but relatively tamed hair, a pointed nose and big brown eyes on a petite face and frame. The boy shook his head, sandy blonde hair longer than it used to be, taller and broader, but otherwise much the same. Same goofy, wicked grin, same glinting eyes that couldn't play innocent if he tried. He'd always relied on his partner in crime for that.

"They have to be, if you aren't rapidly damaging your eyesight are you really in an arcade?" The man said, grin solidly in place. He laughed as he received a swift elbow to the ribs.

As she spotted an updated four-player Pac-Man game, Katherine Pryde drug her partner with her. They went around that way for hours, one dragging the other to the next game in turns. Finally, with no machines broken, they approached the room of prizes with the equivalent of fistfuls of tickets loaded onto their game cards. As they walked in, a familiar face turned to greet them, causing both parties to freeze in between a fight or flight reaction. Now completely bald, and portlier than ever, it appeared Mr. Patucci had expanded his business.

After five seconds of silence, a defeated smile appeared on his face, and he shook his head like a man who frequented Vegas accepting he was once again going to lose this hand and come home in the negative. "Seriously," he said, gruff voice exasperated as always. "Don't you kids have anything better to do?"