Laura Kinney/X-23

Subject Facts

Full Name: Laura Kinney
Codename: X-23
Age: Late teens
Gender: Female
Archetype: Super Hero
Aliases: Wolverine, Laura Howlett, Talon
Marital Status: Single
Affiliation: X-Men

Subject Attributes

Superhuman Abilities: Healing Factor: Much like her father, Laura’s primary mutant power is an acute healing factor that enables her to regenerate damaged tissues with far greater speed and efficiency than most humans. She is capable of healing from injuries that would kill most; including those causing severe blood loss. Bullet wounds, slash wounds and puncture wounds tend to be gone in a matter of minutes, whilst more serious injuries that may take weeks for many to recover from are gone in a matter of hours. The speed of her recovery can vary – fluctuating depending on her mood and psychological state. When enraged, damage is much more quickly healed, while self-inflicted wounds or those sustained while resting remain present for some time. Similar to Wolverine, Laura’s aging is significantly slowed.

Her healing factor also grants her an increased immunity to poisons and toxins, and many drugs are rendered useless unless Laura is exposed to much higher doses. In such cases, the effects are shorter lived. Disease has little effect on her, and while her healing factor is active, she is near immune to Eart-borne virus and infection.

X-23’s stamina is vastly increased, her healing factor washing away the usually produced fatigue toxins muscles create during physical exercise. As such, she can exert herself at peak capacity for much longer periods than humans.

Bone Claws: Laura’s skeleton includes two retractable bone claws in each arm and one in each foot. Extra sets of muscles allow her to extend and retract any combination of said claws at will, though her wrists and/or feet must be kept straight at the moment of extension or retraction. Her claws are housed beneath both skin and muscle tissue, and unsheathing them causes her skin to tear and bleed. Wounds are quickly healed thanks to her enhanced regenerative healing factor. Her claws are naturally sharper than human bone and indeed more resilient, though they have been made even more-so following being coated in rare, near-indestructible adamantium.

- Adamantium Coating: Unlike Wolverine, only Laura’s claws have been coated with adamantium, leaving the rest of her skeleton very human in its make-up. Her claws themselves are capable of cutting through near any substance, depending on the amount of force she can exert and indeed the thickness of the substance. Harder, thicker metals pose a problem and can cause significant damage to X-23 - just because the adamantium won’t break doesn’t mean her hands and wrists won’t.

Superhumanly Acute Senses: X-23 possesses superhumanly acute senses, comparable to certain animals; notably wolves. She is capable of seeing at much greater distances than a human, and with much greater clarity. She retains said level of clarity in total darkness. Her sense of hearing is enhanced in a similar manner, able to hear noises outside a human’s auditory range and at further distances. However, most impressive is her sense of smell, by which she can immerse herself in and single out individual scents, allowing her to track targets with an impressive degree of success. The weather and other outside factors can interfere with her sense of smell. Laura is also capable of picking up on people’s emotional state using a combination of her senses – listening for heart beats and sniffing at the air for the scents of sweat etc.

Peak-level Reflexes: Laura’s enhanced senses offer her enhanced reflexes, often acutely aware of what is going on around her thanks to small changes in scents and sounds.

Peak-level Athlete: X-23 is a naturally gifted athlete, made only more competent thanks to her healing factor. Stretches, jumps and pivots impossible for most are well within her ability thanks to her body’s ability to rapidly heal muscle damage.

Standard Abilities: Expert Tracker: Due to her enhanced senses, Laura is a competent tracker, made more-so through training with members of Weapon X, and later Wolverine himself. She has the ability to memorize a number of scents and is capable of immense focus, picking out single targets in a large group or crowded area.

Covert-Ops Training: Raised in captivity and trained since birth to be an assassin, X-23, simply put, is a living weapon. She is incredibly skilled in hand to hand combat and the arts of stealth assassination, but is also competent in the use of firearms and explosives. Laura has proven herself to be a solid member of a team, and knows how to use her strengths alongside others to ensure the success of missions.

Martial Artist: X-23 has been tutored in a number of martial arts techniques and is confident enough in her ability to mix and match a variety of styles to suit her purpose.

Acrobat: Laura is an Olympic level athlete, focusing on dexterity and speed over brute strength in combat. She is a capable gymnast and aerialist, able to perform a number of complex feats.

Multlilingual: Laura is capable of speaking fluent English, French and Japanse.

Paraphernalia: Beyond her X-Men costume, a leather crop top and leggings marked with the famed ‘X’ symbol, Laura uses little in the way of additional paraphernalia, changing what she carries with her depending on her given mission.

Subject Weaknesses: Mortality: Despite Laura’s incredible healing factor, she is not invincible. Massive amounts of damage can knock her out of fights, and she is made only more vulnerable by her possessing a human skeleton – thus lacking much of the protection Wolverine possesses. She can still be killed, as extensive injury slows the effectiveness of her healing factor, and she is untested against many enemies the world pits against her. When fighting superhumans with abilities beyond human understanding, it is difficult to know just how much her healing factor can overcome.

Reckless: Though she isn’t invincible, Laura believes she is, and treats her body accordingly. She often ignores the warning signs caused by immense pain and pushes herself into potentially life threatening situations because she believes her body will be able to regenerate damage done. This can leave her seeming brash, and she often confronts people without truly assessing the situation first – especially when angry.

Sensory Overload: Laura’s heightened senses can be her downfall. Incredibly loud noises or a huge range of scents can assault her ability to process what she’s seeing, hearing and smelling, and unable to deal with the information, struggles to act at all. This significantly slows her reaction time, and at times pushes her toward a complete inability to act at all.

Psychotic Break: X-23 was bred to be a killing machine, and was raised thus. Her introduction to the world outside murder has been difficult, and there are times her new life is at odds with learned instinct. When experience and instinct clash, it can force Laura to have what many would call an ‘episode’ – during which she locks herself away and damages herself, pain something she finds both normal and calming.

Berserker: Rage is something that constantly bubbles beneath the surface of X-23’s skin. While she has become better at diverting herself from anger-fuelled outbursts, often cutting herself rather than others in order to lessen her urge to brutalise others, there are times she can’t catch herself. In such outbursts, triggered generally by certain scents or damage done to herself and her friends, she struggles to differentiate between ally and foe and struggles knowing where the line is between ‘damaging’ and ‘killing’ those she attacks.

Subject History

Laura Kinney was not born via usual means. Her very existence and the power she possesses was planned, mapped out before conception by both scientists and soldiers. A secret program, with links to a number of private benefactors, was tasked with recreating the work of the original Weapon X experiment – specifically the bonding of adamantium, an unbreakable metal, to the human skeleton. The original project had been successful thanks to the mutant Wolverine, but unable to find a viable subject with his tenacity and ability to heal, subsequent attempts failed miserably. Not one subject was able to survive the experiment. Fed up of failure, Doctor Martin Sutter, the project’s director, hired geneticist Sarah Kinney and tasked her with finding something that could withstand the process – pushing her toward creating a clone of the original Weapon X mutant himself.

Using what little genetic material that was left following the original Weapon X’s dissolution, Sarah Kinney was unable to salvage a single Y chromosome despite 22 attempts. The DNA strands were too damaged to be of use, and thus Kinney proposed they create a female clone. Her request was initially denied, though she went ahead and created a viable female subject, prompting Sutter to reconsider his position on the matter. On the twenty-third attempt at creating a clone, they were successful, Kinney acting as the surrogate mother – eventually giving birth to X-23.

Following her birth, X-23 was raised in captivity and spent years being trained to be a living weapon, despite Kinney’s efforts to have the child retain some semblance of humanity. Her efforts were in vain, other members of the project seeing the clone as nothing more than an experiment, and following seven years of relentless tutelage in the arts of murder and assassination, Zander Rice, another doctor at the facility took it upon himself to subject the young girl to radiation poisoning, accelerating her dormant mutant gene – revealing bone claws in her hands and feet and a healing factor to rival her genetic father’s. Happy with the results, Rice and Sutter subjected X-23 to the adamantium bonding process, coating her claws in the metal. Unlike so many subjects before, she survived.

Returned to training, the pair continued to experiment on her, having her kill her original tutor for fear he was overly kind to the girl, testing what was called a ‘trigger scent’ – a chemical compound baring a specific scent, capable of driving X-23 into a berserk rage. She was sent on her first mission at the age of eleven – to kill Presidential Candidate Greg Johnson. Numerous other missions followed, the project hiring out her talents to bidders, leaving X-23 emotionally stunted, unafraid to kill and baring little love for authority figures.

X-23 experienced her first taste of freedom when Sarah Kinney, her surrogate mother, released her from captivity in order to help find her missing niece. The young girl, Megan, had been kidnapped. She was easily found and rescued by X-23 – though Sarah lost her contact with her ‘daughter’ following her actions, Rice demanding he take full control of the program. Sutter agreed – before having Rice end his life, using their living weapon.

However, Sarah was unable to let Rice and his favoured assistant, Kimura, hurt her daughter any longer. Confronting Rice, she was fired instantly, and he revealed he had secretly created a number of other clones, all, in his eyes an improvement on X-23. Freeing the original clone once more, X-23 was able to destroy the pods and mortally wound Rice, before turning upon her mother, a dying Rice having exposed Kinney to the ‘trigger scent.’ X-23 murdered her mother in cold blood, and Sarah’s dying wish was that X-23 take the name ‘Laura.’

Laura travelled to San Francisco, tracking down Megan, Sarah’s niece, unsure of where else to go. Taken in by the family, she lived happily for a few months before her past caught up with her, former facility members storming the Kinney family home in order to recapture X-23. Even though she was able to fight them off, Laura knew she couldn’t stay with the family as her presence endangered them, and she went to find the man truly responsible for her origin – Wolverine.

She found him in Xavier’s Home for Gifted Mutants, though their initial reunion was short. Laura barely had time to explain her reason for seeking him out before she was arrested by Steven Rogers and questioned by Matt Murdock, both men concerned about the number of murders she’d committed, operating under SHIELD guidance. Murdock, luckily, was able to deduce her innocence, realizing she’d been made into the weapon she was. Despite differing opinions, she was released from SHIELD custody so that she couldn’t be used and exploited by another secret service.

She spent the next few years of her life living on the streets of New York City in the employ of a pimp named Zebra, though they eventually went their separate ways, Laura working alongside a number of homeless mutants in order to protect them from her former employer. Taking a job at a nightclub caused her to meet with Wolverine once more, and helping him and a team of X-Men defeat a mutant enforcer named Geech, she was finally enrolled in Xavier’s academy.

During her time there, she became incredibly protective of her father, and it took her a long time to truly settle in. She stuck by his side on near every mission he went on, acclimatising to life as an X-Man. Other students at the academy were slow to warm to Laura, and it led her to struggle with depressive thoughts and led to incidents of self-harm.

Following the events of M-Day, X-23 was one of the few students to retain her powers, and thus remained enrolled at the academy. It was during this time she began to be accepted by the others around her, her aid in stopping bombings by William Stryker and protecting fellow members from her own past and Kimura looked favourably upon. She formed friendships with the likes of Cessily Kinkaid, and developed strong feelings for Julian Heller – though beyond the odd kiss, little ever came of them.

X-23 was among Cyclops’ chosen ‘X-Force’ team, her past making her an ideal agent. While Wolverine initially disagreed, suggesting that he was trying to encourage Laura to leave the life of an assassin, it was noted how useful she would be. Tasked with hunting down the remaining Purifiers, X-23 showed her talent in assassination, but also still proved she had much to learn. She was seen as reckless with the lives of her team mates, too focused on the mission than on the protection of those that called her a friend.

She returned to the X-Men soon after, moving with them to San Francisco during the ‘Messiah War’. The events would leave her scarred; being united with an old friend in a terrible condition, being recaptured by the facility that created and subjected to a number of tortures that ended in her losing an arm – one she had to reattach using her impressive healing factor. Struggling to deal with the fall out of the war caused by the mere existence of Hope Summers, Laura quit the team in order to ‘find herself’. Joining up with Gambit and Jubilee, Laura travelled the globe; aiding those in need and, in her case, babysitting for the Future Foundation in an attempt to achieve some sense of normalcy.

It was at this point the X-Men found themselves divided, forming two teams in what was known as the Schism. Unable to side with either, Laura left Gambit’s side and joined the Avengers Academy, though maintains strong ties to a number of former X-Men.

Subject Interview

A thick blanket of snow covered everything, an endless sea of pristine white stretching as far as the eye could see. Flakes fell slowly, undisturbed by even the slightest of breezes, and an eerie stillness hung over a wilderness that usually teemed with activity. Even the thick grey clouds above had ceased their listless drifting, blotting out light from a waning moon, casting long shadows across the untrodden drift. Her breath rose as wispy phantoms, corporeal for only a moment before dispersing, vanishing as if they had never truly existed.

Her nostrils flared as she sniffed the air not once, but twice, licking her lips shortly after, almost able to taste the stench of his sweat on her tongue. Her brow narrowed, and her lips pulled back in a silent snarl. He was close, even if his tracks had been covered by a night of snowfall. She was sure if she dug deep enough, she would find boot marks beneath the fresh fall. Taking a few steps, the drift crunched underfoot as she followed her nose, drawn forward by the ever more potent scent of her target.

A Russian; or so she had been told. A large, middle-aged man with thinning hair and glasses - a scientist who fought adamantly against mutant rights. She cared little for that description; and was infinitely more focussed on the given information that had triggered her hunt. Her target, no matter his appearance or political leanings, had experimented upon children. Innocent children. Strays and stowaways who had no home, no family, and were desperately in need of care. He had promised mutant children shelter, and then used them as personal toys.

She knew what that felt like, and it turned her stomach.

She had been stalking him for weeks, and while initially she had merely watched his mannerisms and movements, her first two attempts at reaching the target had been unsuccessful. On both occasions she had dispatched his security teams, but on both occasions, he had escaped. Ever wearier of the clawed assassin that seemed to live in shadow, he had fled to Russian; to a secluded forest in a secluded mountain range, far from her. Or so he thought.

She had been tenacious; just as she had been taught to be. She followed him, tracking his stench across the country, and she knew with every step she took she was getting closer. The Russian would pay for his crimes. He would not hurt another child again.

Moving into a dense cluster of trees, a new scent tinged her nostrils, far stronger than the one she followed, and it was quickly followed by a low growl, causing her head to turn. Crouched low on its haunches, a few feet from her, stood a lone wolf, dark eyes narrowed and teeth bared. She cursed inwardly, knowing she had been too focused on her target – she had not properly surveyed her surroundings. Not that it mattered; she showed no panic confronted by the snarling beast.

Locking her brown eyes to the creature’s, she held its angry gaze. Her stare bore no fear, only confidence. Neither broke the connection they had made. Slowly, she shook her head and raised her hand, clenching her long fingers into a fist, before the sound of a knife scraping against bone caused the wolf’s ears to pin back against its head. Two long, sleek, metallic claws jutted from her hand, shining despite the distinct absence of light, and she pointed them at the canine.

The wolf crouched lower, before letting out a short, sharp howl, turning tail and loping off into the trees. Even though its territory had been invaded, it knew it was beaten. Her nose wrinkled and she rolled her shoulders.
'Wonder if the Russian will know he’s been beaten when he finds his territory invaded?' She doubted it. When it came to humans, Laura Kinney often found people unable to accept defeat.

That was, until they were run through with her claws. Defeat was much harder to deny at that point.

Author's Notes

Player Alias: Star

Other Characters: Natasha Romanoff

How did you find MFT?: Co-creator/founder