Catseye
Name/Alter Ego Sharon Smith Notable Aliases Catseye Species Mutant Age 15 Affiliation Xavier's School for the Gifted Location New Salem Quote "Meow" Powers/Abilities Ailuranthropy

Sharon Smith, who often introduces herself as Catseye, is a former Hellion and a current student at Xavier's School for the Gifted.

BackgroundEdit

Unlike most mutants, Catseye's powers manifested at birth rather than puberty. So when her parents saw their baby girl turn into a cute little kitten they were shocked. Infact, they were so shocked and disgusted that they dropped her off at some alley and left.

Being rather fortunate, the little kitten was adopted by an alley cat who heard her helpless mewling. Growing up with the cats, always in her cat form as she was clueless about her powers, Catseye came to believe that she truly was a cat. She learned everything and anything from the cat who raised her as her own. Catseye lead a rather normal life for a cat, until one day when her feline mother was tormented by some nasty kids and her powers kicked into play, morphing her back into her human form, a thing that freaked the kids and got them to run away-ending the suffering of her feline mother.

Despite being saved, Catseye's feline mother was quite frightened by the transformation her surrogate daughter undergone and scattered away, leaving her all alone for a second time in her life. Catseye herself was quite shocked by the transformation and after several more occasions in which her power kicked in, she finally learned to accept it as a special ability. It didn't take her long to learn how to control this transformation, and change from cat to human and vice versa out of her own free will. She even used it to her advantage for survival in the streets.

Catseye continued to lead the simple life of a cat besides the occasional morphing into a human in order to scare away potential threats. One day she happened to meet with a member of the Hellfire Club, one who was charged with a certain scouting mission in the area she occupied at the time. By chance he happened to see her change from a cat to a human, using her human form to remove the lid of a trashcan, acknowledging the mutant he mentioned the incident in his report. When Emma Frost happened to go through that particular report she decided that this unknown mutant might be a good addition to a team of young mutants she's been assembling, a team that came to be known as the Hellions.

All it took to get Catseye into the car of the retrieval team sent to collect her was a simple bribe in the form of food. Having lived as an alley cat, Catseye hadn't a chance to eat too many quality meals, and the smell of the food she was offered easily caught her attention. Not being familiar with the ways of the human world, Catseye never suspected a trap, and never really cared as she was busy enjoying a perfectly good meal while being on her way to meet the person who would forever change her life.

Emma Frost was the person to welcome Catseye into the Massachusetts Academy with a short telepathic conversation, leading to Catseye's enrollment in the Massachusetts Academy and her addition as a member of the Hellions. First and foremost, she learned how to speak English, so she could communicate with others instead of being restricted to communicating with Emma by telepathic means.

Under Emma's guidance she learned more about her powers and how to use them. That's how she eventually came up with her hybrid form, a were-panther beat form not unlike a werewolf, combining human and animal features for a superior form far stronger and faster then her regular cat or human forms. There was, however, one thing Emma could never teach Catseye. The notion of Catseye being a cat amongst humans. Despite having assigned Catseye with a human name and having taught her about the ways of the humans, Catseye refuses to accept the truth about her being a human, even telepathic experiments failed to generate any change in Catseye's fervent belief of herself being a cat.

Unfortunately, the wonderful if interesting life at the Academy would not last long for Catseye. Sebastian Shaw, a fellow Inner Circle member of the Hellfire Club with Emma Frost, had grown enraged with his colleague and decided to punish her by destroying her Academy by an orchestrated Sentinels attack. Luckily, a precog member of the Hellions foresaw the attack and warned Roulette, a Hellion with the power of probability manipulation, who then created a Wheel of Fortune--probability altering discs--inside the common room to try and save as many of the students as possible.

Catseye happened to be one of the beneficiaries, as moments before the attack, a mouse scurrying outside the common room window caught her attention and she promptly set chase. Seconds after she jumped through the window the entire building was destroyed by Sentinels. Though she was wounded, Catseye's healing factor took care of her minimal injuries while she instinctively went into hiding in the nearby woods. Looking at the destruction, Catseye realized there will be no survivors and as she couldn't sense any, she just took to wearing her cat form and started to live on her own again, as before, hoping to one day happen about Emma Frost once again.