Kitty Pryde

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This page is about the Phase 2 incarnation of the character. For other uses, see Kitty Pryde (disambiguation).

PHASE 2

Kitty Pryde
Portrayed by Rachel McAdams
Codename:	Shadowcat
Affiliations:	eXcalibur
Birthdate:	February 1, 1984
Journal:	xp_shadowcat
Player:	Gwen

Kitty was a student at the Mansion years ago who left in an attempt to find her own life. She found out, however, that some things you can never escape.

Details

Character Journal: Shadowcat

Real Name: Katherine Anne Pryde

Codename: Shadowcat is her modern codename (she switched over around age 16). As a kid, she went by Ariel, then Sprite and finally settled down with Shadowcat.

Aliases: Kitty or Kate

First Appearance: March 18, 2015

Date of Birth: February 1, 1984

Place of Birth: Illinois

Pronouns: She/her/hers

Citizenship: American

Relatives:

• Grant Bell (on-again, off-again partner, deceased)
• Carmen Pryde (father, deceased)
• Theresa (Terri) Seric [Pryde] (mother, divorced her father and remarried)
• Luke Seric, stepfather
• Kate (Katarine) Abendheimer Shapiro (maternal great-grandmother, deceased)
• Samuel Prydeman (paternal great-grandfather, deceased)
• Chava Rosanoff (paternal great-aunt, deceased)
• Nina Shapiro (aunt)
• Kenneth Shapiro (cousin)

Note that Kitty doesn’t currently get along with any of her family members and with the exception of her mother and the occasional phone call, hasn’t spoken with them in years.

Education: BA in arts administration from the University of Illinois in Chicago. Informally, Kitty is a complete nerd (and former child prodigy who began taking college courses in her preteen years) and has taken a number of online courses and self-taught herself a fair amount about the computing field. As an intelligent woman who has a job with long periods of inactivity and a computer at hand, she has also amassed a decent wealth of knowledge on completely random topics. (Though not all of the information she has gained is altogether all that accurate.)

Relationship Status: Dating Scott Summers.

Occupation: Kitty’s currently unemployed with a small savings account and life insurance payouts left to her by her ex-lover. She quit her last job after the events of New Year’s Eve. Kitty had worked as a collections manager for the Birling Family Trust’s personal art and artifacts holdings for the past 7 years in Clyde Hill, Washington.

Team Affiliation: eXcalibur

Biography

Childhood

Kitty started life as a relatively normal girl in Deerfield, Illinois. She was the beloved only child of Carmen and Terri Pryde, parents who were somewhat aggressive about pushing her toward becoming a high achiever. Her father was a banker, her mother a housewife and so the family had both time and money to throw at Kitty and her pursuits. She began ballet at three, piano at five and always had more things going on than most kids her age.

It didn’t start to affect Kitty until she was about thirteen. Thirteen was the year that her parents’ relationship seemed to become tense for reasons that she didn’t understand. Her own body began to change and it seemed that she was always fighting with her mother over grades, dance, wanting boyfriends… and then the headaches began. They started with a throbbing, then her vision began to blur and when Kitty was next aware, she was always somewhere else. In another room or even another floor. And then Kitty began to remember things—falling through floors, walking through walls…. She started to think that she was crazy and the acting up became even worse, to the point where Terri and Carmen began to threaten to send her to her aunt Nina’s or to a boarding school in Chicago. The only comfort that she had was her books and her dance class. She confided in her teacher, Stevie Hunter, but in no one else’s.

Then her family received an offer from Xavier’s School. To her parents, it seemed like a godsend. To Kitty, it sounded like hell.

Living At The X-Mansion

The Prydes packed her off on a flight to some small town in New York that she’d never even heard of. To her surprise, it would be her salvation.

Kitty spent the next five years at Xavier’s School, training and on occasion, fighting alongside other mutants with her abilities. She left the school in the fall of 2002, deciding that it was time for her to lead a normal life. In truth, although she didn’t tell the others, her decision was spurred more by the separation of her parents. Kitty hoped that by going to college back home, she might somehow heal the rifts between them.

Beginnings of Adulthood

She began a program in Arts Administration at the University of Illinois. It didn’t stop her parents’ eventual divorce. Her father moved up to Chicago and Kitty, siding with him, moved into the small home he bought near her school. She completed her bachelor’s and began looking for jobs at local theaters and museums. By this time, she realized that a career in dance was impossible, given her private fears that she would somehow “out” her mutation but she wanted to stay connected.

Kitty started managing a local community theater and moved into a small studio. Her life was uneventful and, she thought, exactly what she wanted. But sometimes, when she stared at the news, she knew that she wasn’t truly fulfilled.

She thought of trying to go back to New York in 2008 but was stopped by her father’s death. Settling his estate—and the acrimony between her and her mother (helped along by Terri’s remarriage)—exhausted her emotionally and to some extent, financially as Carmen had been deep in debt. A friend recommended her to Rue Birling, an eccentric wealthy heiress who collected oddities and managed a large fortune for her family’s trust. When Rue offered Kitty a job handling the family’s private collections of art and artifacts, Kitty took it gratefully, using the excuse to move to the west coast and dive into a job that would let her bury herself in work that didn’t matter. Old, dusty objects felt good after months of dealing with people and lawyers (and yes, she does think of them separately).

The Birlings, however, were unusual in themselves. Some of the objects she found in their archives had interesting histories behind them, gotten in illicit ways or with mysterious stories attached. From time to time, Rue would send her on a hunt for one thing or another. Kitty tried not to think too much about the legalities of her dealings because, after years of the “normal” life she had craved, this was an adventure and one that she loved.

A Love Lost

When she wasn’t out hunting mysteries, Kitty spent most of her time in libraries and lectures. It was at a talk on Jane Austen that she met her future partner, a disaffected bookstore manager named Grant Bell. Kitty was never good at dating (though she knew how to flirt) and when Grant asked her out, she said yes primarily because she was surprised. They stayed together as a couple over the next five years, on-again and off-again. The off was mainly because of Kitty’s refusal to commit, the on because, at the heart of things, she was lonely. She still yearned for the family that she’d had as a child but also for the family that she’d gained at the age of 13 when her own family began quietly falling apart.

Things might have kept on as they were had Grant not been hit by a car and killed on New Year’s Eve, 2014. He was a stupid casualty of the catastrophic event of that night—the disintegration of a mutant behind the wheel of another car caused the accident. Even though Kitty had kept her secret to herself, fearing always that she would bring harm to Grant, he had still died at a mutant’s hands. That was when she decided she’d had enough of a normal life. It was time to go back to the mansion.

Coming Home

Kitty came back to the mansion unexpectedly changed. Though she found herself picking up the threads of old friendships with Jean and Scott, new alliances emerged. After she ran into Clint Barton at a bar, Kitty was swiftly pulled into an underworld of seedy Russians and later, submariners.

She has also found herself joining the X-Men in several missions as she tries to sort out what her future holds at the mansion.

Physical Characteristics

Height: 5'6"

Weight: 119 lbs

Eyes: Hazel

Hair: Brown

Other Features: Kitty is fairly average in appearance. She’s never really stood out as much more than a pretty “girl next door” type. She does have extremely muscular legs (and incredibly ugly feet and toes) from years spent en pointe in ballet classes. She does still dance in the privacy of her bedroom though now, she has no aspirations of becoming a world-class ballerina. (She wishes she’d become a ninja instead, the way things are going.)

She prefers to dress comfortably in baggy sweaters and jeans (though she hides a dress and heels at the back of her closet to remind her that she’s still a girl). Her eyesight has faltered a little as she’s gotten older and she now wears glasses and squints when doing computer work. There are two pieces of jewelry that she wears—one is a Star of David necklace passed down (so family history has it) from her namesake and great-great grandmother. The other is a simple silver band that she wears on her right thumb.

Powers

Kitty possesses “phasing,” the ability to pass through solid matter and objects by passing her atoms through the spaces between the atoms of the object through which she was moving. She and the object through which she was passing can temporarily merge without interacting. Each is unharmed when she finishes passing through.

When attacked, she can phase to allow oncoming projectiles or energy blasts to pass through her harmlessly. She can disrupt electrical equipment by passing through it with variable effects, none of them good for the equipment. (For instance, passing through a computer is likely to destroy the information on it.) She can phase through other material objects, including people, but cannot selectively make just one part of her body tangible.

Using her ability, Kitty can “walk” on air or water. She is intangible, however, when she does so and to become tangible would put her at some physical risk. She can also phase her clothing along with herself though she does need to concentrate somewhat to do so.

She can stay phased as long as she is concentrating on what she is doing (5-10 minutes is the longest she feels safe doing this but it can actually be more like a 15-20 minute timeframe if she's feeling very zen). She does not need to breathe while phased. So far as items that she can't pass through, she wouldn't be able to pass through something like an energy beam or magnetic force field.

She can phase things that she's carrying of relatively small mass already (otherwise, she'd be phasing naked all the time and well...). Relatively small mass indicates something probably in the vicinity of that easily carried, say 20-30 pounds. However, the object remains intangible with her. She can't, for instance, phase a gun and shoot someone with it at the same time.

Equipment

Her trusty Alienware laptop

Huge collection of retro games and consoles in a storage unit in Illinois, along with other odds and ends

Trivia

• Kitty and Jean have been good friends for years due to a chance meeting at the mansion as teenagers.
• Kitty has no alcohol tolerance and gets drunk very easily.

External Links

xp_communication posts

xp_journal posts

xp_logs posts

Plots

2015

It’s Greek To Me

Cruelty is Bitter Bane

Roadside Assistance

2016

The Plaguebearers

2017

X-Men Mission: Repent Harlequin, Said the Tick-Tock Man

Happy Campers

2021

X-Men Mission: Agents of SHIELD

A Fistful of Nanites

Potomac Calls to Chesapeake

Meta

Player: Gwen

Pronouns: She/her/hers

E-mail:

AIM: halias@ironangel.net

Player Icon Base: Rachel McAdams

Meta Trivia

In Phase 1, Kitty, played by Cora, was one of the very first characters in the game. She was retired with Jamie in August 2006.

Gwen entered the game during Phase 2 in February 2015.