Andie Picton

Andie Picton is an original fictonal character who first appeared in New Mutants: Last Class.

Background
16 year-old Andrea Picton was living the dream: captain of the cheerleading squad, defacto leader of the most popular clique, star player on the field hockey team, dating the starting quarterback, and cheating on him with the star receiver. Her parents, who had also peaked in high school, couldn't have been more proud. In the following year she would be a senior and planned to take the title of Homecoming Queen, thus completing her streak of teenage domination.

But years of careful planning and shrewd social maneuvering were put in jeopardy the day Andrea woke up a mutant. She had the ability to control her own hair, a pretty sweet power as far as she was concerned: useful, potentially deadly, and yet easy to hide - plus she was going to save like a full hour in front of the mirror every morning. She just had to tell someone. Considering the candidates carefully, Andrea chose to confide in her closest and most trusted friend, fellow cheerleader Jamie McCormack.

She chose poorly: Jamie ratted her out in two minutes flat, and it didn't take much longer for rumours to spread across the school. What began as whispers in the hallway quickly turned into accusations, slurs, and even a couple threats. Andrea could easily have tried to hide her power and simply talked her way out of the situation, but for some reason she chose not to deny it. Instead, she chose to fight.

She gave them exactly what they wanted: the so-called "mutant threat", a whole face full of it. Long locks of golden blonde hair shot out in a half dozen directions at once, lifting bodies into the air and tossing them aside. Those that could, ran - so did she, all the way home. Mutant protesters began to turn up at her house not long after she did, and she fought them too. But Andrea soon discovered that adult Purity members do not back down as easily as frightened teenagers do.

Her saviour arrived with perfect timing, descending from the sky like a god. Andrea recognized him immediately as the X-Man Julian Keller, codenamed Hellion. Julian kept Purity at bay with a wall of green force, took one look at Andrea, and spoke the three sweetest words a man could ever say to her: "Love your hair." He put an arm around her waist and off they flew.

Andrea was lovestruck, though she deflated somewhat when she learned that not only was Hellion already cavorting around with another girl - a blind girl calling herself Blindfold - but that Andrea was only the first of a handful of mutants the pair planned to save. Blindfold was a precog and had had some visions about other mutants and blah blah whatever. Andrea didn't really care, except that it meant that she got to fly around the world with Julian.

New Mutants: Last Class
Together they collected three other young mutants from around the globe, consisting of Owen Prince, Koji Watanabe, and Antonio Oliverio. Each was given a codename; Julian himself picked "Dreadlock" for Andrea, much to her delight.

Blindfold led the team on one more trip, this time to Minsk, Belarus. But this was no easy meet-and-greet like the others: by the time they arrived, the mutant they had planned to rescue had already drawn the attention of an entire squad of fully trained and equipped Purifier soldiers. On top of that, they weren't the only team of young mutants to show up. Some trainee X-Men arrived by jet, with dorky little uniforms and everything.

It was a war zone. The Hellions had met a little resistance in Japan but this was something else entirely - and Andrea found it fun. For the first time since that morning at school, Andrea - no, Dreadlock - got to really cut loose with her powers.

In the end they made it out in one piece, with not one but two rescued mutants to show for it. Together they flew back to North America, to the X-Men's mansion in New York. There, Hellion rejoined the X-Men and invited his young team to study and train with him.

It was only at that moment that Andrea fully realized what being a mutant truly meant. There was no way she could return to her home in Montreal. She assaulted well over a dozen people and was lucky not to be facing time in juvy. Her parents probably wouldn't even speak to her. Years of social climbing and carefully laid plans were ruined. But at the same time, she had new power. Intense new power. Looking back at her old life, everything she fought for seemed so.. trivial by comparison. She was different now. Better than.

Andrea accepted Hellion's offer and immediately began forming a fresh plan to rise in the ranks in her new school. When the squad-based training system was announced, Andrea lept at the opportunity. Julian would be her advisor, naturally, and she quickly asserted herself as team leader. The New Mutants - the very same ones she had fought beside in Belarus - seemed to be the existing alpha dogs at Xavier's, and so Andrea kept them in her sights. Their leader just happened to be an admittedly cute blonde who had the gaul to also be called Andrea. Disgusted, she shortened her own name to Andie. This other girl even seemed to have her eyes on her Julian. What nerve.

Timeskip and the Last Stand
Andie led her squad with an iron fist. She hated that her path to success at her new school depended in part on teamwork, which meant having to rely on others. The school held weekly inter-squad competitions, with the team with the most wins by the end of the school year winning the prestigious Xavier Cup. The trophy simply had to be her's. She pushed her squad as hard as she could, but even with extra training and a healthy dose of cheating, keeping up with the New Mutants squad proved to be harder than she had anticipated. Rather than hating them, to her surprise she actually grew to admire them (though she would never openly admit it).

Her plans to win Julian's heart were even less fruitful. No matter how she tried, how she flirted and manipulated, he never saw her as anything but a student, a child. It infuriated her.

Even with her focus locked firmly on the Xavier Cup, Andie could tell that the war between the X-Men and the Purifiers was not only intensifying, but inching ever closer to true disaster. Field exercises off school grounds became less and less frequent, and with good reason. On one such outing, her team was ambushed by a Purifier hit squad, and in the ensuing skirmish, Andie was shot in the back.

It was no ordinary bullet that struck her, it was something new. The Purifiers had attacked her squad in order to test the newest weapon in their arsenal: Glory, a weaponized version of Hope serum, designed to depower mutants. And it worked.

Andie was the first, but not the last mutant to lose their powers to Glory. Just as becoming a mutant had shattered her ordinary life, losing her mutant powers had destroyed everything she had worked so hard to rebuild at Xavier's. Without powers she was only human again, and was asked to leave the school. She returned to her home in Montreal, though she only stayed the three months that remained before her 18th birthday. Legally an adult, she left home and disappeared.

She surfaced six months later in Paris, France when she made headlines with the release of a tell-all book about her time at Xavier's. A deliberately provocative pack of stretched truths and outright lies, Degeneration-X was an instant hit. In it, Andie called the X-Men a "cult", characterized the Xavier Institute as a training ground for brainwashed child soldiers, and claimed that she had taken the Hope serum voluntarily after making a dramatic escape.

The climactic battle between the Purifiers and X-Men that would become known as The Last Stand of the X-Men occurred only weeks after Degeneration-X hit the best seller's list.

In the following months, coinciding with the global initiative to pass legislation mirroring the American Superhuman Registration Act, Andie once again made international headlines with the launch of her controversial website, Sentinel.com. Ever since, the anti-mutant blog has tracked the movements and activities of mutants around the world, and has also come down hard on so-called "haven nations" - countries deemed to be doing a poor job of policing the SRA.

Through this sort of attention Andie has risen to B-list celebrity status as a socialite and fashion maven. She has made numerous appearances on news networks and political talk shows representing an anti-mutant stance, and has been romantically connected to a number of young movie stars and star atheletes. She currently resides in Paris.

Powers and Abilities
Andie Picton is a depowered human mutant, formerly a Beta-level mutant. She is a talented writer with a flare for the dramatic, and is a shrewd debater. Due to her training at Xavier's she is competent in hand to hand combat and acrobatics.

Before losing her powers, Andie had prehensile hair which she could fully control and even lengthen or shorten at will. The maximum length of her hair was never tested, but was known to reach well over 30 feet in combat. Her hair was supernaturally durable and each strand had a tensile strength equal or superior to that of advanced titanium alloys. By coiling her hair around her body to provide rigid support, Andie had demonstrated the capacity to lift up to 10 tons, and possibly more. It was suggested that her control over her hair was actually psionic in nature.