History
August 1986 brought a surprise to the Christan household. Marie was pregnant... again! The last thing Marie and Lance needed was another child, they already had four: Shawn was seven, Patrick was four, David was three and Lance Junior was two. Marie and Lance were by no means a rich couple, Lance worked for the NYC Police force and when their third child was on the way Marie had given up her job to stay home and raise all the children. After three times of her hopes being dashed (the first time she was just happy to be starting a family) she had also given up on having the baby girl she wanted. She was convinced she and her husband couldn't have girls. So April 1987 brought another big surprise. Marie and Lance were both elated! Not having a name picked out for a girl, Marie immediately began calling the baby her Little Angel. Lance thought the baby looked beautiful like her mother, and called her Baby Marie. The couple soon agreed to split the difference and named her Angel Marie.
Growing up, Marie couldn't spoil her daughter the way she would have wanted to. But Angel never noticed, she had more than enough love from her parents and four older brothers, and was most always happy. Her mother was the only reason she didn't grow up a complete tomboy. In between Angel learning how to take a hit and talk trash from her brothers, much to her mother's chagrin, she learned about being a girl and that it was alright to express her emotions and herself from her mother. Ever since she was born, Angel and Marie spent at least a couple hours each Saturday afternoon just the two of them, they called it their Just Us time.
No one was ever sure who was devastated the most in 1999 when Marie disappeared. Both Lance and the oldest boy Shawn, who had joined the police force by then, spent much too much time and connections trying to find her, even after plausible evidence of her death was found. Their bosses gave them both leeway for what they felt was a fair amount of time, knowing the loss was abrupt and hard on the entire family. But eventually they had to force Lance and Shawn to give up their search. Lance immediately fell into a depression of grief, almost enough to interfere with his job.
Angel had also held out hope for her Mother the whole time, refusing to even think of the other possibility. She stood at the door every day waiting for her father and bother to come home with her mother. The day they returned finally forced to face the truth, she still wouldn't. She refused to go to the funeral. For weeks she held resentment against her family for giving up. Between Angel's anger and Lance's depression, the family was nearly torn apart. When Angel ran away from home one Friday night, and the boys couldn't find her for two days, it snapped Lance out of his grieving. All five of them were afraid Angel may have fallen to the same fate as their mother. But as her mother had always told her school was the most important thing for her future, she showed up for class on Monday morning and the school immediately called Lance to let him know she was found and safe.
As much as he wanted to be angry at Angel, Lance couldn't bring himself to yell at her. Instead he vowed to himself to see to it his family remained one, the close one they used to be. Angel's brother Patrick found no problem in yelling at her however, and soon became the only one in the family willing to take on the role of enforcer with her. After everything the family had been through, no one else wanted to, they were too afraid of her running away again.
So it didn't help when Angel began sneaking out on punishments and breaking curfew. It took a few times before she started getting caught, but stricter attention on her only made her try harder to get out. It wasn't that she didn't love her family or understand their worry for her, she did appreciate that they were a family again. But she needed OUT every so often. Time with girl friends, time to be alone, just time away from... life, and years later because she wanted to date.
Eventually the family settled into a new life, as happy and normal as they could be as a father raising four boys and one girl could be. Especially after what the boys refer to as "the week".
The week was about two years later. It started with Lance Junior. He was out with his friends one day after school girl-watching and making comments when one of his friends turned to him and made a similar comment about Angel. Suddenly all of his friends were agreeing. Incensed, he forced them to shut up about his sister. But as the next pretty girl walked by he suddenly started realizing that the girls he was watching and commenting on were probably somebody else's sister. Which meant there were probably all sorts of guys out there looking at Angel and thinking about her the way he was looking at other girls and thinking about them. Shocked, he shared his revelation that evening with Patrick and David. They didn't believe him. So the next morning Lance Junior pulled Patrick and David down the stairs and the three piled around the corner of the kitchen door to watch Angel. They didn't see it at first, but over the next couple of days the boys came to realize Angel was not only a pretty girl, she was beautiful and developing all the curves boys liked. David stood in shock when he finally actually saw it in her, just staring at her, which made Angel nervous that she had done something wrong. When he called for their father, she got really worried because for the first time she didn't know what she was about to get in trouble for. But when Lance came into the room and David pointed at Angel and demanded their father make her stop, and Lance finally got out of David that he wanted Angel to stop becoming a woman, Angel was thoroughly confused. Lance just sighed and shook his head, and said he couldn't. It was clear Angel was going to grow into her mother's looks, if not surpass them. After that the boys had to come to grips with the fact that their sister - the one they had taught football and roughhoused with and had taught how to shoot a gun and could keep up with any of them in any game - was turning into something they didn't know what to do with. They decided the only thing they could go would be to keep all the boys like themselves away from their sister.
A few months later Patrick graduated from high school and was the first in his father's family to apply to and be accepted to college. He was going on a full athletic scholarship, but intended to become a doctor. The family was very proud of him. Patrick had always been the different one of the boys. Shawn had gone into the police force after he graduated high school to follow in his father's footsteps, David and Lance Junior both had plans to do the same. Patrick was worried before he left that Angel wouldn't get the discipline she needed. But after a minor incident during the summer over which Lance took charge, Patrick felt alright about leaving.
The following year, Shawn was accepted as a NY State Trooper and finally got his own place, leaving David and Lance Junior in charge of "looking out for" Angel. David graduated high school and joined the police force that year as well.
Lance Junior was a year behind, and began worrying about when David was going to get his own place and Angel would fall solely on Lance Jr. He was two years ahead of her in school, which meant he would likely have to stay home for two years after he graduated to look out for her. She had voice several times that she intended to follow Patrick's example and her Mother's ever-constant advice on getting an education and would be going to college, so he was planning on that. Angel had taken a liking to computer programming and was thinking about getting a degree in that, she had even started taking classes in school to see if she'd want to.
But then the following year Angel started doing... very strange things. Scary things, which scared her as much as her family. The day she exploded a corner of a teacher's desk during a quiz was the day she stopped going to school, she was too afraid of accidentally hurting someone. Her sophomore year had just started two weeks before, right about the same time the strange powers had. A day later Lance mysteriously got a call from a Professor at and owner of a NY private boarding school who claimed he knew what was happening to Lance's daughter and could help her. After checking out both the school and the Professor's history, credentials, and every type of record Lance could get his hands on, he was satisfied that the school was legit and took Angel to visit it. He left the choice of attending up to her, and after a few trial weeks she decided to stay at Xavier's Academy for Gifted Youngsters for the rest of her high school career.