David Alleyne

David Alleyne is a Marvel Comics character who first appeared in New Mutants Vol2 #4. The fictional character history below is specific to the setting of the New X-Men game.

Background
When David Alleyne first manifested the mutant ability to borrow the knowledge and training of those around him, he could easily have used it for his own personal gain. To the contrary, however, he actually worked himself even harder than usual, driven by a strong sense of integrity to learn everything he could the hard way. He managed to keep his powers a secret, but after a brush with Purity, David wound up accepting an offer to study at the Xavier Institute.

David initially chose Dani Moonstar as his advisor, and was later sorted into the New Mutants training squad under her leadership. Given the codename "Prodigy", he joined squadmates Wind Dancer, Surge, Elixir, Wither, and eventually Icarus. He initially declined the offer to lead the team, but eventually agreed to a co-leadership with Wind Dancer.

In the boy's dormatory, his randomly selected roommate turned out to be his squadmate, Josh Foley. Polar opposites in personality, the two initially clashed, but eventually developed a strong friendship. David also began a tumultuous relationship with Surge.

Like over 98% of the global mutant population, David awoke on M-Day to find that his powers had disappeared. After some debate he was allowed to remain at the Xavier Institute, despite no longer being a mutant, and survived repeated Purifier attacks on the school. Though he was able to contribute during dangerous missions on repeated occasions even without his powers, his friends and teachers often held him back for fear that he may not be able to defend himself. When the Stepford Cuckoos offered him the opportunity to get a degree of his powers back, he accepted.

David's powers were not fully restored - instead, the Cuckoos removed the mental block that had prevented him from retaining the knowledge and ability he copied from others. The full abilities of every person he had met since his mutation surfaced were now at his fingertips, enabling him to properly contribute to his team once again.

New Mutants: Last Class
Over a year later, David, now an X-Man, was chosen to lead a mission to retrieve and train a group of young mutants who had just appeared on Cerebra - the first new mutants the world had seen since M-Day. Starting with the American mutants, David personally brought Kelly Marshall back to the Xavier Institute. She, along with Nathan Jacobe, Andrea Richmond, Alexander Derasmo, James Maddison, Ryan Townsend, and Thomas Reese, would become the latest incarnation of the New Mutants - the first of several new training squads.

Under David's guidance, the New Mutants proved to be one of the top squads at Xavier's, and among the most likely candidates for induction into the X-Men, often handling actual field assignments as a team, such as the dramatic rescue of Ambrosy Voronovich and Sveta Kitarov.

Timeskip and the Last Stand
Along with the influx of new students at the Xavier Institute came a return of some of David's former classmates, such as Ben Hammill, Paras Gavaskar, and Julian Keller - and perhaps most notably, he and Noriko gradually rekindled their former romance. For a time things seemed to be going well; sadly, it wouldn't last.

As the Purifiers became an increasingly serious threat, the security of the Institute and the safety of it's student body became an issue. When the Hellions squad was ambushed by reavers, leaving Andie Picton depowered, many among the X-Men considered it to be the last straw. By the end of their second year, the Xavier Institute was shut down, and the X-Men relocated their base of operations to a stronghold in the waters near San Francisco.

A final standoff between the Purifiers and the X-Men was inevitable. During the climactic battle that would be known as the Last Stand of the X-Men, David was assigned assist from the Xavier Institute, with orders to dismantle the facility's key technological components should his fellow mutants fall in battle - which is exactly what happened.

Devastated by the loss of his friends among the X-Men, including everyone from his best friend to the love of his life, David took solace in the knowlege that his training squad had survived, teleported to safety in Wakanda before the battle. The Institute students eventually formed Unity under Anole's leadership, though Anole made it perfectly clear that the new team was strictly for mutants and mutants only.

In the wake of the Last Stand, when the Superhuman Registration Act was about to undergo an immediate upgrade to include the criminalization of the X-Gene, David immediately applied to the Initiative. Considered at the timeto be the world's leading expert on mutants and mutation, he was quickly inducted and tasked as a consultant in the effort to train and refit the 50 State Initiative for the apprehension and processing of mutants.

Fearing the backlash from the mutant community, David worked in secret, cutting off nearly all ties with Unity and his former students. From within the Initiative, David abused his position in order to provide false identities for mutants living in hiding in the United States, and to keep the Initiative from ever finding them.

New X-Men
Years later, following the passage of Evangeline Whedon's Mutant Rights Act and the subsequent decriminalization of the X-Gene, David was contacted by his former students via a coded email cypher he had set up with Kelly Marshall. In response he agreed to meet them in front of the now-derelict Xavier Institute.

The reunion, nearly a decade in the making, was spoiled by an ambush by the rogue 51st. The 51st, long suspicious of David's status as a depowered mutant, had followed him in the hopes that he would lead them to his mutant friends.

Powers and Abilities
David is a depowered mutant, formerly a Gamma-level mutant, and now considered by some to be a "Rem". Prior to M-Day, David presented the mutant ability to copy the full knowledge and competence of anyone and everyone near him, including semantic, procedural, and implicit memories, but excluding episodic memories. This allowed him to become a deadly fighter in the presence of someone like Wolverine, or a brilliant scientist in the company of Dr. Henry McCoy. These copied abilities immediately faded when a subject passed out of a range of roughly 30 yards.

Since losing his powers, David had a mental block removed by the Stepford Cuckoos, which allowed him to permanently access the sum total of everything he had ever copied. Though he is unable to copy new information from individuals he meets, he retains the complete expertise of the X-Men, as well as many other prominent individuals. As a result he is an expert in a wide variety of subjects and disciplines, including everything from alien technology to martial arts to mutant genetics.

David is known to use a variety of technological gadgets of his own invention, most famously in a pair of high-tech goggles that grant him advanced cybernetic senses and allow him to remotely interface with computers, hands-free.