JEAN GREY

Jean Grey was ten years old, playing frisbee in the yard with her best friend Annie Richardson, when the frisbee sailed into the road. Annie ran after it and never saw the car. Jean reached her first, gathered her into her arms — and her latent telepathy switched itself on inside Annie's dying mind. She did not watch her friend die; she experienced the dying from within, holding on to Annie's fading self until the light went out and she snapped back into her own body, still cradling the corpse. The full account waited until Bizarre Adventures #27 (1981).

The aftermath nearly finished what the accident started. A part of Jean seemed to have died on that roadside: she became withdrawn, serious, almost haunted, and by eleven she could hear the thoughts of everyone around her with no way to shut them out. Her isolation was not sulking — it was survival, because the noise in her head was overwhelming enough to kill her. Her parents took her to psychiatrist after psychiatrist, and none of them could help, because none of them knew what was actually wrong.

One referral finally landed: Charles Xavier, himself a telepath, who sealed Jean's mind-reading away until she was old enough to bear it and helped her telekinesis develop safely instead. Years of training later she walked into his school as Marvel Girl, the first female X-Man, in X-Men #1 (1963) — and during one early astral-plane session her mind had already brushed, unknowingly, against an orphaned teenager named Scott Summers. The most powerful mind on the team began as a ten-year-old who had to be locked out of her own gift to survive it.