Rachel Summers as the Phoenix

Rachel Summers is a fictional character, a comic book superhero. She is the daughter of the X-Men Cyclops and Jean Grey from an alternate future; she travelled through time into the modern-day Marvel Universe and became infused with the Phoenix Force.

Powers

Rachel has expressed the powers of telepathy, telekinesis, and "chronoskimming," which allows her to temporarily transplant a person's mind and send it through time into a younger/older version, or a close ancestor/descendant, or as a disemboded astral form. For a time, she was also bonded to the Phoenix Force, and she had its cosmic powers at her disposal. As a legacy of the time she spent bonded to the Phoenix Force, however, she is able to physically time-travel of her own accord (and was shown taking another with her).

History

Rachel Summers comes from an alternate future known as Days of Future Past, where the assassination of Senator Robert Kelly provoked the ratification of the Mutant Registration Act, leading to a dystopian future where the mutant-hunting Sentinel robots rule the world.

Rachel Summers in her hound outfit.

Rachel was abducted by operatives working for Ahab, who used drugs and hypnotherapy to turn Rachel into a "Hound," a mutant who tracks down other mutants. She fulfilled her duties, but her psychic powers linked her to her victims, fuelling her grief and despair, until she attacked Ahab and scarred him. In return, he sent her to the mutant concentration camps. Rachel managed to send Katherine Pryde's consciousness into the past to prevent the assassination, but it did not change their time; she sent her astral form into the past to find out why, and discovered she had sent Katherine into an alternate past. On the way back, she encountered the disembodied Phoenix Force, and it followed her back. Rachel passed out from the strain, and the Phoenix Force revealed itself to Katherine, who asked it to give Rachel a fresh start.

Rachel Summers in her first Phoenix outfit. Art by John Romita Jr.

When Rachel and Katherine broke into Project Nimrod on a suicide mission to destroy the new Sentinel, Katherine spoke the word "Dark Phoenix," and the Phoenix Force ripped Rachel from the timeline and sent her bodily back to the past, a past where Jean Grey was dead, and her father was married to someone else.

Rachel took a vow to remember her mother with the uniform and name of Phoenix, and the vow allowed her to bond fully with the Phoenix Force.

She had a brief membership in the X-Men before co-founding the British superhero team Excalibur, and remained with that team until an incident lost her in the timestream. She exchanged places with a timelost Captain Britain and emerged two thousand years in the future, in a world conquered by Apocalypse and crushed under his iron fist. She gathered together a group of rebels and founded the Askani. She trained one of her followers to timejump back and bring her "brother" Nathan forward when he was infected with the techno-organic virus, and cloned him in case he didn't make it. Apocalypse's followers attacked and took the clone, leaving Rachel critically injured. Hooked up to life support, she drew the minds of Scott and Jean into the future (as "Slym" and "Redd") to raise Nathan and tutor him in the use of his powers, until she finally died ten years later, sending them back to their original bodies, seconds after they had left.

However, that timeline was eventually negated by the actions of the X-Men in the present. As a result, she was lost in time again, until saved by Nathan (now the superhero Cable). She returned to the present and decided to take a break from the superheroic, and enrolled in college after she made Cable promise he wouldn't tell anyone she was back. Despite her efforts to live a normal life, she was kidnapped by the telepath Elias Bogan, and subsequently rescued by the X-Men. She decided to rejoin the X-Men, taking the name "Marvel Girl" to honour her mother (who had died), and wearing a costume her mother had designed but never worn (a variation on Jean's first green costume). She has also changed her last name to "Grey" (becoming Rachel Grey), possibly to express disapproval at her father's continuing affair with Emma Frost.

Parentage

It is occasionally, mistakenly, believed that Rachel may not, in fact, be the daughter of Scott Summers and Jean Grey; due to the "Days of Future Present" story where Scott was unable to track her when turned into a "Hound," (see "History") while the similarly-afflicted Invisible Woman was able to track her son Franklin Richards, who at the time had been replaced with an alternate, teenage, version. Alternative theories have included the possibility of her being a spawn of the Phoenix Force, which temporarily replaced her mother in the Marvel Universe, or that Logan (Wolverine) might be her father. It was later confirmed by the Phoenix Force¹ that she was, indeed, the daughter of Scott Summers and Jean Grey.

1 - In Excalibur #52.

External Links

Spotlight On... Phoenix III at UncannyXmen.Net (http://www.uncannyxmen.net/db/spotlight/showquestion.asp?faq=10&fldAuto=59)