KITTY PRYDE

Phasing was supposed to be the safest power on the team: nothing can hit what it passes through. In the Morlock tunnels during the Mutant Massacre, Kitty Pryde threw herself into exactly that logic, phasing Rogue clear of danger — and the Marauder Harpoon hit her anyway. His energy-charged harpoons did something no ordinary weapon could: they caught her mid-phase and broke the machinery of her gift, leaving the switch jammed in the intangible position.

Back at the mansion the diagnosis kept getting worse. Kitty could concentrate with everything she had and still not make herself solid. She could not eat, drink, or be touched, and the team's physicians concluded her molecules were not merely unlocked but slowly dispersing — left alone, the girl who walked through walls would eventually spread out into nothing at all. She was kept alive inside a stasis chamber, a patient preserved at the exact point of coming apart.

Holding her together took one of the strangest collaborations in X-Men history, with Reed Richards and Doctor Doom both drawn into the effort to rebuild her cohesion during the Fantastic Four vs. the X-Men affair of 1987. Kitty did recover her solidity and her control, but the Massacre had rewritten her default setting for good: where she once had to concentrate to phase, from then on she had to concentrate to stay solid. Intangibility became her resting state — the ghost position was home now.