21 years old phases through matter
citizen of the United States member of Excalibur
permanent opposite-sex partnership
Kitty is, to all intents and purposes a second-generation team member. Though born outside to human parents, from the age of thirteen she lived in the Westchester house with the X-Men as a kind of adopted child. She was given the run of the house, access to huge amounts of information and technology, and regular exposure to the kind of overwhelming danger that the X-Men regularly face.It left her in the awkward position of an overprotected child who expected to take up the combat life of an alpha mutant. Her solution, finally, was to leave both her team and the country, and to re-settle in the United Kingdom and join her friend Kurt Wagner's team, Excalibur.
The Kitty I met is tightly focussed and almost ghostlike. She's happier working with computers than engaging in combat, and her tendency to absent-mindedly walk through walls scared the living daylights out of me on a couple of occasions. Talking with her, I got a sense of a very mature, very young person -- a forty-year-old mind with a fifteen-year-old's experience. It's at war with the real adult she's becoming now. I get the feeling that by the time she's thirty, no one who knew her as a child is going to recognize her.
Sinclair: What do you miss about the States?
Pryde: Shopping. Honestly. I used to live a half-hour by train from New York City; now I live off the north coast of Scotland. We're two hours from Edinburgh and nine from London, unless we fly down. So I have to get used to having the village shops, and making long runs whenever I want anything bigger than a sandwich.
Sinclair: Any perks?
Pryde: Oh yeah. Brian [Braddock]'s accepted that he's going to buy me whatever tech toy I ask for, and he can usually get one of his corporate lackeys to deliver it by helicopter. And up here I don't have to share my machines with a houseful of aspiring engineers; I get to be geek-girl all by myself.
Sinclair: So if you had to pick?
Pryde: Don't ask me that. Really don't. I can't answer it without hurting somebody's feelings, no matter what I say. Because everybody in Westchester loves me so much, and I love them back, I do, but I like the work I'm doing with Excalibur.
Sinclair: With fewer babysitters.
Pryde: Yes. The fuzzy elf [Kurt Wagner] doesn't have any delusions of being my daddy, and it's good that way.
Sinclair: And Pete?
Pryde: OK, I have it on pretty good authority that Kurt and Brian spent about an hour threatening Pete when I started dating him. But that's as much Pete as anything else, I think. People keep thinking he's going to make off with the silver or something.
Sinclair: Is he?
Pryde: I have him on a short leash, trust me.
Sinclair: Different kind of choice then: if you could quit, would you?
Pryde: What? No. But I'd like to get us some better communication systems. This'd be a lot safer if we could share information across the Atlantic.
Sinclair: You don't want to do something normal.
Pryde: I've been doing this since I was thirteen. This is normal. Not to Pete, but his brand of normal isn't most people's either. If we weren't doing this, we'd have to find some other way to get our adrenaline fix. Climb mountains or jump out of planes or do those eco-challenge races where they make you canoe and cliff-climb and swim and run across deserts and stuff.