Real name: Doctor Jean Grey
Occupation: Associate Professor
Identity: Wayyyyyy Too Public (not that she has a secret ID)
Legal status: Citizen of the United States with no criminal record
Other aliases: Red, Jeanie, Dr. Grey
Place of birth: Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, USA
Marital status: Single
Known relatives: John and Elaine Grey (parents), Sarah Grey
(older sister), Joey and Gailyn (nephew and niece)
Group affiliation: None (unless Bard College counts)
Base of operations: Bard College, Duchess County, New York
First appearance: September, 2000
History:
Jean Grey was born to John and Elaine Grey in Annandale-on-Hudson. She was born into a comfortable middle-class white-bread family, with an older sister named Sarah. Her days were full of bliss and joy as her sheltered life kept her from more than a few skinned knees and one broken arm. As she went to school, she acquired a best friend, Annie Richardson, and the two were inseparable. Elaine knew that if the two girls weren't at her house, they were over at the Richardsons'. Sarah had her own group of friends, so she and Jean never really spent a great deal of time together. That was all right with Jean, she had Annie to hang out with. As they grew older, the two girls got more active, playing out in the yard or whatnot. On one particularly fine day, Elaine Grey heard a scream from the yard, near the street. Rushing out to the sound of her daughter's voice, she found Jean cradling Annie, and a terrified and pale driver bolting out of his car, repeating over and over that he didn't see the girls in a stricken voice.
Annie died shortly upon arriving at the hospital. Jean cried bitterly, demanding that her friend wake up, claiming that she'd heard Annie's voice even after Annie had died. Elaine and the newly-arrived John chalked it up to a child's fantasy. However, Jean started saying some truly wild things, like claiming to hear voices that no one else heard, seeing pretty lights that no one else could, and moving things without touching them. The Greys were upset at the change in their pretty daughter, and they sought out the best child psychologists for advice, while Jean struggled with her own identity and these invasive voices in her head.
The psychologists prescribed various meds to control Jean's behavior, but the girl grew more and more frightened by what was happening to her. She didn't understand why no one would believe she could hear voices, she didn't understand why she could move things just by looking at them, she simply didn't understand why her best friend died and she didn't. She saw the spectre of Death over her constantly, a presence waiting to prey upon her very soul. In the end, all of the counseling and all of the drugs couldn't put Humpty Jeanie back together again.
She was eventually remanded into the custody of a mental institution.
In the institution, Jean was given drugs that sapped her very will. These drugs kept her barely lucid, and it tore her parents' hearts to see her there, yet they didn't know what else to do for their daughter. Sarah rarely came to visit during this time, and she never brought her kids with her. Over the course of a few years, Jean was given a regular high school education, when she was properly conscious and lucid enough to remember. As she neared her 17th birthday, she was released from the institution, proclaimed mentally stable and ready to be rehabilitated into society.
Little did they know.
Only through constant use of prescription drugs aimed at dampening the imaginative parts of her mind down, Jean is able to make it through every day, one by one. Like a recovering alcoholic, she counts each day as a blessing, and she has to consciously work to make it through any given day. Eschewing a more social life, Jean found her balance in a library, living her life vicariously through books and through scholastic work. She eventually went to college at the age of 18, got her BA at the age of 21, went back to school for her masters, which she achieved at the age of 23. She decided to follow her father's path in life, going back for her doctorate, whose thesis she successfully defended in 1998, at the age of 26. At the age of 27, she was hired by Bard College as a mere associate professor of Sociology.
In the past year, she has made some inroads into this whole alleged mutant situation and has started setting herself up as one of the premiere proponents of the idea that mutants do not exist. Repeat, do not exist. Despite the so-called Black Prom, Jean is still of the belief that it wasn't mutants, that someone was merely using that hysteria as a mask for their sinister deeds. She was invited to Columbia University by Professor Charles F. Xavier to speak at the Symposium. Having prepared her speech, she went and gave a properly sedate commentary on exactly why mutants didn't exist. The Symposium was crashed by an entity who called himself Magneto, and Jean Grey was willing to fight for her beliefs, trying to prove in the face of his seeming abilities that it was all stage trickery, smoke and mirrors, doing her best to debunk the mutant theory head-on. Magneto let her live, despite her best efforts to piss him off, and Jean Grey has returned to Bard College, an instant unwilling media sensation.
Height: 5'8" Weight: 125 lbs.
Eyes: Emerald Green Hair: Fiery Red
Unusual physical characteristics: Jean Grey is nearsighted due
to academia and wears glasses.
Strength level: Jean possesses the strength of a normal woman
who eats too many Ding Dongs.
Known superhuman powers: Jean Grey has not, since the time she
was a child, exhibited any mutant powers. Having drowned them out with
meds or denied them strenuously, she would merely register as a latent
mutant. However, she has vast psionic potential, particularly in the
telepathic and telekinetic arenas.
Other abilities: Lecturing, Scholarship, Sociology, Medicine,
Researching.
Weapons and paraphernalia: None, unless you count her mouth.
Other notes: Full and eighth.