Leda

But the Brotherhood was gone, in tatters without Magneto or his children to lead it. The X-men were dismantled where they weren't dead, and even at fourteen she was too young to know how to be inspiring enough to pull people to her. So for a while, for a few years, she just survived. Ran from the cops that would have put her in foster care and kept running until her feet hurt, then again until she couldn't feel them anymore. She hitched rides up the East Coast, keeping a knife close at hand whenever the driver was male, and eventually added pickpocketing to the repertoire of less legal skills an older sibling had taught her. When she couldn't get a ride with someone else, her brother Ashley's lessons on boosting cars made ends meet.

Somewhere around Jersey she finally stopped for a while, and that was when she heard about the meeting. The meeting, in Wisconsin. She nearly made it to the site before all hell broke loose, and rather than risk the same fate as many, hung back and hit the road again shortly after.

What she saw in Milwaukee stuck with her, though - things were getting worse. As bad as they had been, humans weren't getting better any time soon... And every subsequent attack she'd hear about on the news in some washed-up diner made her angrier, more bitter, less likely to keep walking with her head down and hands to herself when she heard some gaggle of apes beating their chest at a more obvious, less fortunate mutant than she.

The next time, she took a piece of rebar to the back of one squawking flatscan's head and wound up in the E.R. for her troubles. The time after that she was a little better, a little faster - only broke a few fingers. And she kept getting a little better, a little faster, learning from her mistakes to be more aware of her surroundings and pick her targets more carefully. Even her weapons of opportunity seemed to be helping, the little remnants of feeling left in them from their last use lending to her 'education.' But she let herself slip. Let the threshold for anger drop a little bit further, so it wasn't just humans actively going after mutants that caught her ire.

The first time she took a swing at a guy just for saying what was on his mind was also, poetically, the last time - that was the time cops took notice before either could do any real damage. And once she was identified as a less than masked vigilante, the culprit of several such attacks over the last several months, it took no time for her to get booked and 'relocated.'

The MCI was terrifying, and her first real reminder of what she wasn't. She wasn't powerful, wasn't big enough or strong enough to hold her own in a real fight when she didn't have the advantage of surprise. She wasn't scary - just a thin slip of a girl still learning her way in the world. So she learned to keep her head down, to bite her tongue, to grit her teeth even when she wanted to snap them at the nearest offender.

And it kept her alive, just long enough to see a prison break. El Paso, though, was at least a couple hundred miles west, and the closest she got to freedom that day was seeing it happen to someone else on the news. It was a glimmer of hope, though, when the leave programs started - to think that maybe, she could someday soon be on that short list of detainees released back into the world. But the release program quickly revealed itself to be cold comfort, full of empty promises. So few were let go that in the time she spent there, Leda never knew a single person on the release list. Hope diminished, and bitterness seeped into its place, to the point that even when help finally did arrive, she wasn't entirely sure what to do with it.

But she went anyway. The group that sprung her and a number of others from that hellish prison claimed to be a subset of the X-Men, and while historically a little too goody-goody for her tastes, beggars couldn't be choosers and Leda didn't complain. She just kept her head down, bit her tongue, grit her teeth...

These days, she's still trying - but it gets harder and harder with so many battles fought just to be allowed to live.

Personality: Generally, Leda can be described as surly. She has a lot of pent-up resentment and anger that sometimes spills out onto other people even if they don't really deserve it. Her sense of humor is sarcastic, abrasive, and a little dark. If there's a soft, nougaty center somewhere underneath it all, no one's found it yet.

She's also just a little stupid when it comes to risk taking, definitely guilty of the chihuahua complex. She acts bigger than she is, seems to think she's invincible, and has a serious problem listening to authority figures - especially when she decides they shouldn't have authority over her, which can be for any range of reasons.

Oh. And she hates humans with a bloody passion.

Special Notes: Wears a bracelet woven from bits of colorful cloth around her left wrist.

Played by Chloe Howl.