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xxxxxBack in the 80's and 90's Erik Lehnsherr, aka 'Magneto', was canvasing the eastern seaboard, looking for recruits for his newly established Brotherhood of Mutants. It had existed in many different forms over the years of course, but it was finally becoming a codified organization. In his search he visited many communes and co-ops, these places often being refuges for people out of sync with their family homes for being different, including many mutants. In one such place known as the Blue Moon cooperative, in South Stratford, Vermont, Lehnsherr met a lovely woman in her thirties named Susanna Dane.
It was the late spring/early summer of 1986 and the two had a lovely, whirlwind romance, even though both knew it wouldn't last. Unbeknownst to both of them however, Lehnsherr left Dane with his legacy. In February of 1987 Susanna gave birth to Lorna Dane, but had no way of contacting Erik. Their romance had barely lasted two weeks before he moved on, and they were both at peace with his leaving. Susanna set about raising the child on her own, with the help of the Blue Moon people of course. Lorna was born into part of her mutation, seaweed-green hair and eyes, but didn't discover the superconductor mutation until puberty.
Lorna was homeschooled until she was ready to begin ninth grade in the local public schools, but public school did not work out for her. She was a late bloomer as far as puberty and then her powers went. So she was 14 and starting a new school when they started to manifest.
This lead to a lot of electricity accidents which were surprising for the other people around Lorna, but ultimately harmless to her. She learned to play with electricity the way other children played with blocks or dolls. She found she could absorb and store the electricity in her body, and then convert that energy into magnetic fields. However her ability to just 'play' with it was thrown completely out of balance in the throws of pubescent hormones, and high school mean girls.
Lorna found herself teased in the public school, for both her hair, and her awkward manner compared to most of the other public school kids. The teasing got so bad in the first month that she lashed out. Luckily, her ability hardly hurt anyone, but it did generate an EMP pulse strong enough to blackout her small town and several surrounding towns as the grid backed up and shut down to reset.
This power pulse drew more attention than expected however. One, it attracted her father whose hyper ferro-sense detected the magnetic disturbance all the way from New York. The story of Lorna's distress also reached certain rumor mills which passed the information along to the people at Xavier's School.
Curious about the disturbance, Magneto sent a couple of the Brotherhood to investigate and retrieve whoever caused the effect, which to him was obviously not a natural phenomenon. Naturally they didn't handle the situation with much grace. Mystique stepped in posing as the girl's mother, and led her to a pick up with Sabretooth just a few miles out of town. But luckily the X-Men arrived soon after, and rescued her from their attempted abduction. Afterwards they sat down with her mom and explained how Xavier's could be the right fit for her and in the end everyone agreed: Lorna would attend the school for mutants.
Lorna went on to love her time at the school, visiting her mom as much as was practical, but the school became her new home. By the time she was done they had helped her in the Danger Room to hone her talent into something she had great control over. When she graduated she went on to college at UC Berkeley. She wanted warm weather and a chance to take a break from Xavier's. She studied what we know so far about electromagnetism to better understand her abilities and then stayed for a PHD in Quantum Field Theory and how it specifically relates to electromagnetism. Rather than seek a position in academia however, the whole time she was at University, Lorna had been looking forward to returning to Xavier's to become a teacher and full-fledged X-Man.
The attack on Liberty Island was eye-opening for Lorna however. It awoke a whole host of new ideas and political notions for her in a way she hadn't considered before. And when she finally came home in early 2014 with her PHD still warm on the page, her mom dropped the other bomb. She had watched the news footage over and over, compared it with the one picture she had kept of her and Erik from all those years ago, and was finally convinced. She sat down with Lorna and explained that the most famous mutant terrorist in the world is her father.
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