Lea Howlett

After Lea's father (Wolverine) left her mother (Mariko) in Japan, Mariko found out she was pregnant with twins. When they were born, she named them Leo and Lea, thinking back on a conversation Logan and her had had about names they liked. Mariko didn't want them to be harmed by her or Wolverine's enemies, and didn't think she could give them a good life, so she traveled to America and left the twins at different orphanages there, knowing they'd be safer in places where they could blend in and live out normal lives apart from each other, and hoping that they wouldn't be mutants like their father, even if they didn't show any signs of it yet. However, when their powers inevitably became too much for them to handle because they didn't know how to control them, Lea and Leo, at different times, were taken from their orphanages by the MRD (Mutant Response Division). Mariko, taken over with guilt when she learned this had happened, as she made sure to have some of her allies keep an eye on them, finally contacted Wolverine and told him everything. Because of this, the X-Men were on the lookout for Leo and Lea, but were unable to find where they were being kept. Lea, now called X66, was put into the wrong hands, experimented on, and given an adamantium skeleton at only seven years old, a process she shouldn't have survived. Here, she met and made friends with fellow mutant Rocky Wolfe, and his brother, Tyrus Wolfe, too. The time she spent in cages and the traumatizing situations associated with them made her slowly develop a deep-set fear and eventually phobia of them, and small spaces in general. Her recovery from the adamantium took a long time, especially because the people experimenting on her took almost all of her memories from her and kept using her for their tests. However, she used her weakness to her advantage, fooling her captors into thinking she was too frail to do anything so she was able to eventually escape, although she had to leave Rocky and a mentally-deteriorating Tyrus behind in the process, which filled her with guilt and grief. She lived on the streets for three years under the name Jade, until a nine-year old mutant, Sky Yearz, sent by Charles Xavier with a few members of the X-Men, found her, and they brought her to the Institute of Gifted Youngsters.

Upon reading her mind, Charles recovered some of her oldest, youngest memories, and, piecing things together, told Jean, who did a DNA test and found out that she was Wolverine's daughter. They told Wolverine, who took her in as his own. Leo was found a few months later, and had had the same experiment done on him by similar experimentalists as the ones in the MRD, giving him an adamantium skeleton as well, though his recovery had been better than Lea's. Lea was scared of everyone at first, but eventually relaxed into life in the School and into her new name, Lea Jade Howlett (taking her street name and making it her middle name). Overtime, she made friends such as Sky Yearz, Fiona Monroe (the daughter of Storm), Jack Shade, and others as well, forming a close bond with Leo in the process. The group deemed themselves the "X-Kids." One day, Rocky showed up at the School's door, weak and almost dead. He recovered at the School, and Lea and Rocky continued being close friends, until they eventually started dating around the age of fourteen. About two years later, Tyrus, Rocky's (very mentally ill) brother, returned for vengeance, convinced that Lea and Rocky had left him to die with the MRD. He eventually managed to critically injure and poison Rocky, and Lea almost killed Tyrus in her grief and fury, but refrained herself and incapacitated him instead. Unfortunately, even with their best efforts and medicine, Rocky died the next day. Tyrus was sent to an insane asylum for mutants. Lea had been in a dark period of her life for a long time, and Rocky's death only made her worse. She eventually started acting somewhat herself again, but she had changed, as she had been doing gradually for a while. She became more shut off, and she finds ways to deal with her stress and to hide her self-hate, such as playful flirting, though she's afraid to get into an actual relationship. Though it still haunts her that she lost someone who meant so much to her, she continues on and deals with problems as they come, focusing more on her missions and the safety of humans and other mutants.