The last children of Sarah and Abednego Winters, Naomi grew up being praised by her parents just for being 'normal'. While her favorite brother (who had Cool Eyes and Moving Hair! So Cool!) was shipped off to their grandmothers, Naomi was kept around as a testament to the town of Helen that the Winters were still normal, not a family of mutants. During the tourist season she was able to escape to the woods to hang out with her brother and his friends, but during social events in town Naomi was kept close by.
When she was 11, her grandmother died and shit hit the fan at home. Lael started hearing voices - everyone's voices - and soon ran away from home. Naomi managed to keep in contact with him during this time, intermittantly and mostly on the school wifi. She did a lot of Googling of her brother's symptoms, concluding with him in time that a) he was probably experiencing telepathy and b) hey, isn't NYC full of mutants? She sent him a link to Evolve Cafe's website, which lead eventually to Lael enrolling at Xavier's.
With Lael safely away at that school in New York, Naomi got to focus on her own problems. For the first years of her life, Naomi had chronically dry skin, particularly on her face, that hardly responded to moisturizers. Around her 12th birthday, these patches began to change into patches of keratin, snake-like jet-black scales. Her body is now covered in patches of these scales, most notably on her forehead and cheekbones but also on her shoulder blades. Now, she looked a little bit more like her snake brother.
She was expecting anger from her parents, and was met with tears at first. But then she asked them not to be mad, and suddenly they weren't. During the lockdown of COVID-19 in Helen, she tested the limits of her new powers, and once New York City was inoculated in April, Naomi flew out to meet her brother in Westchester, and enroll at Xavier's for the coming fall.