Laura Kinney

## Personality

Laura is very taciturn, rarely uttering more than one sentence or two at a time. Because she grew up in a controlled environment, she speaks using perfect grammar, rarely using slang. Due to being forced to kill anyone that showed her any kindness, Laura is very reluctant to get close to anyone even though she is out of the Facility’s reach now.

With her fast healing powers, Laura tends to cut herself with her claws when she becomes stressed her anxious, something she has done since she was very little.

When provoked she is extremely aggressive and it can be difficult for her to calm down once she has reached a certain point of anger.

She doesn’t quite understand her new peers, never having interacted with anyone that wasn’t a doctor or government operative, but she does want to try and understand these new people.

Despite the upbringing Laura received, she has always shown signs of humanity.

## Powers

Laura is a female clone created from X's genetic material, her mutant powers are similar to his. Like X, Laura's primary mutant ability is an accelerated healing factor that allows her to regenerate damaged or destroyed tissues with far greater speed, efficiency, and finality than X. Injuries such as gunshot wounds, slashes, and puncture wounds completely heal within a matter of seconds.

Laura's mutant healing factor and training in the Facility have heightened her physical senses, speed, reflexes, coordination, balance, and endurance to extremely high levels. Like X, Laura possesses retractable claws sheathed within her forearms. She releases the claws through the tissue of her knuckles, leaving small wounds which are healed by her healing factor.

She also has one retractable claw in each foot, which she uses more for defense.

## Talents

She is highly trained in the use of long range weapons and explosives and is a deadly hand-to-hand combatant, with intensive training in numerous armed and unarmed martial arts techniques.

She is also highly educated and so far, has displayed fluency in French and Japanese, while one of the Doctors once described her intellect as being "off the charts".

She can also touch her tongue to the tip of her nose, but the doctors were never very impressed with that.

## Interests

Food. She hasn’t had much experience in the way of food that wasn’t protein shakes or nutritious mush, so now that she is out she is experiencing all these new foods. Her favorite thing right now is pringles, eating at least four cans a day now that she can.

She enjoys reading a lot. She has no favorite genre, but she really tries to avoid anything that talks too much about genetics, she hates to be reminded of what she is. She keeps an old beaten copy of Goodnight Moon with her, a story her mother had read to her from time to time when no one was looking.

Exercise is something she has fun with, when she’s not having to murder anyone, she enjoys running and pushing herself to her limits until she is so tired she can sleep.

She’s very interested in people watching, especially the girls her age. How they dress, talk, act and such. She knows that in order to survive in this world, she needs to learn how to be an actual teenage girl and she always learned best from obvervation.

## History

A top-secret program was tasked to replicate the original Weapon X experiment that bonded adamantium to the skeleton of Experiment X. The project was taken in a new direction: renowned mutant geneticist Dr. Sarah Kinney was recruited to develop a clone of X. Also on the team was, Dr. Zander Rice, who worked his whole life to get to this project after his father was killed by the original Weapon X.

Since the only genetic sample from Weapon X was damaged, Kinney was unable to salvage the Y chromosome. Kinney proposed the creation of a female genetic twin. Her request was immediately denied; Rice was very opposed to the idea.

After many failed attempts at reconstituting the DNA using a duplicate X chromosome, the 23rd sample yielded a viable sample to combine with an embryo. Kinney went over Rice’s head and brought the idea of a female twin to the higher ups and although Kinney was allowed to proceed, Rice exacted revenge for her insubordination by forcing her to act as the surrogate mother of the specimen. For nine months, Kinney was placed in isolation and her every movement was monitored.

Finally, she gave birth to X-23.

For the first seven years of her life, X-23 was kept in complete isolation, only being interacted with when doctors needed blood samples or it was education time. She grew up only knowing Kinney as the woman who would sometimes come to read to her, Kinney having been forbidden to tell the girl of their real relationship.

She grew up lonely and touch starved.

After seven years, Rice decided to subject X-23 to radiation poisoning in order to activate her mutant gene. Also, to mimic Weapon X, he extracted her claws, coated them with adamantium, and reinserted them back into her hands and feet, a procedure that was performed without any anesthetic. Rice then created a trigger scent that would drive X-23 into a murderous rage when detected.

X-23 was then trained to be a hired assassin.

When Kinney's niece Megan was abducted by a serial killer; she smuggled X-23 out of the facility to rescue her. Quickly, X-23 tracked the abductor to his apartment, killed him, and freed Megan. Kinney was immediately fired when she returned and was escorted off the base. Before Kinney was dismissed, Rice had revealed a chamber containing the incubation pods for subjects X-24 through X-50.

Shortly thereafter, Rice assigned X-23 to eliminate the head of the project and his family, ordering her to keep it secret. She murdered the head and his wife, but their small three-year old son she couldn’t find it in herself to kill.

Overcome with a sick feeling since the murder, X-23 contacted Kinney and revealed that Rice was responsible for the murders. Kinney then decided it was time to get her daughter out of there and get X-23 some semblance of a normal life.

Kinney drafted a letter to her daughter, assigning her a final mission: destroy the pods and kill Rice. X-23 succeeded and met her mother in the facility, and they prepared to run. However, prior to his death, Rice had splashed Kinney with the trigger scent. Against her will X-23 went into a murderous frenzy and stabbed her mother repeatedly with her claws.

As she laid dying, Kinney told X-23 that her name was Laura and that she loved her, and handed her the letter and pictures of Charles Xavier and the Xavier School. Now, Laura has crossed many states and cities, finally coming to the school her mother’s letter had talked about. Charles Xavier agreed readily to let her into the school, letting her know that she was safe now with them.