Being born the oldest of a set of twins in a family with four older children (all boys), not to mention the only girl with five brothers, Star found herself very protected when she was a young child. That over protectiveness from both her older brothers and her father, a police officer in South Boston, MA, where she was born, left the little girl, called Starchild by the ex-hippie grandmother that had named both her and her 'little' brother Cloud, feeling rather rebellious. At the age of three, she was convinced that she could do everything that her older brothers could do and that being a girl made her no different from the four older boys and their friends. She would also treat Cloud exactly the way that everyone else treated her: Telling him to be careful, looking out for him, and just generally trying to control every moment of his day.
That changed when their maternal grandmother, the woman that had named the two youngest of the Rosen children, finally passed away when the twins were four. The old woman had been in poor health since before the twins were born and finally gave up after her second heart attack in three years. For the next two years, Star allowed herself to be protected and watched over to the rest of the family's contentment, though she still tried to order Cloud around most of the day.
When the twins started school, they were at first allowed to be in the same class, though that was quickly rectified the next year when they started first grade. It was decided that they should be allowed to grow up to be their own people, at least at school, and that Star tried to be entirely too controlling with her brother. Therefore, Star was moved from Ms Huen's class where the twins were originally placed, and transferred to Mr Judge's first grade class before the school year even started. Finally separated from her twin brother for a few hours a day, Star latched onto a girl that had just moved from Chicago and the pair quickly became fast friends. Her new best friend, Jamie, would never replace Cloud, but she was a good substitute for those times that the twins couldn't be together.
By the time they reached the third grade, Star and Jamie were practically inseparable and the other girl had become the target for most of her orders. That's not to say that Jamie never stood up for herself, but Star tried to arrange her best friend's life so that it was to her satisfacion and didn't care if it wasn't what the other girl wanted.
When the Rosen twins and Jamie reached junior high, Star wanted Jamie to join the track team with her, but the other girl wanted to try out band like her older cousin had done a few years before. Since track wasn't available until the next year anyway, Star agreed to give band a try.
Unable to play much of anything else, Star ended up taking up the trombone as her chosen instrument while Jamie stayed with the alto sax. Unfortunately for Star, this meant that she was now separated from her best friend for yet one more class and only got to see both her brother and the girl she'd adopted as a kind of apprentice at lunch and then again after school. Shortly after her thirteenth birthday, when she and Cloud were in the eighth grade and Cloud was just getting started on school football, Star began to start getting hints of other people's emotions. Eventually, she decided that she was just reading body language and had become sensitive to the moods of others.
There were only two people she ever told about this new little gift of hers: Jamie and Cloud. It was also around that time that she decided that she was going to focus on band instead of track since she wasn't as fast, or as good a jumper, as what she wanted to be but had gotten pretty good at playing the trombone. The next school year, Star and Jamie joined the marching band and became friendly rivals due to the instruments they played. Brass and woodwinds were ever at odds at the school they found themselves attending, after all.
The other trombone players had a tradition of giving nicknames to the incoming freshmen, and Star's freshman year was no different. The names that some of the other students were called were 'HB', a girl that was a year older than Star and wasn't exactly the nicest of people, 'Head', a boy by the last name of Hardwick, and 'God', the senior that was usually first chair. There was some debate for the first week of band camp before the name 'Mother' was picked for the bossy new girl. The name Mother stuck with Star through out the rest of the year and was picked up by a couple of other students until half the school knew her as Mother instead of Star. This was helped by the fact that, on game day, she would usually wear the white t-shirt that the other trombone players had made for her that read 'Mother' in black block letters across the front.
With Cloud now deeply involved in football like their older brothers, Star was starting to feel left out of her twin's life. That's probably what lead her to become interested in cars and how they work; it offered something to bond with her younger brother over. It's not surprising that one afternoon when the twins were almost seventeen, Cloud touched the wrong thing and got a shock. Or maybe /should/ have been shocked, rather. They puzzled over this for a long time before packing and he touched the car again, only to shock it back. That was when the twins decided that the younger of the pair is a mutant and Star made him swear to keep it a secret. At least for the time being.
It wasn't long after the incident with the car that Star was at a party that Jamie was throwing while her parents were out of town for a wedding. Rather than take their daughter with them and have her miss school, they left her at home. It was supposed to just be a little gathering of girlfriends getting together on a Friday night, but one of the other girls' boyfriend found out about it and invited himself and a bunch of other guys over with snacks and… other refreshments. Someone served up a large jug of trashcan punch and the girls only sleepover became an out and out party with fully fifty kids invading the house.
Somehow, Star found herself alone in an upstairs bedroom with a guy that was drunk that just wouldn't take 'no' for an answer when Cloud busted in on them in the nick of time and zapped the guy like he did the car battery just a little while before. Being saved from 'unwanted attention', Cloud dragged a slightly intoxicated Star back home and told their parents about what had happened, even though Star tried to get him to keep it a secret for a while. Fortunately for Cloud, the Rosens were understanding about their youngest's 'condition', but the fact that they didn't know what triggered it or when it was going to happen again left the family a little wary of him. Everyone except Star, that is. She still looked after her brother, seeing it as her responsibility as the older twin; and who cares if she's older just by a few minutes, she's still older!
When a representative from the Xavier Institute in New York came to visit, it seemed like the answer to prayers from the Rosen family. Well, everyone except for Star. She knew in her gut that if he went to this fancy shmancy boarding school, even if it's just for a little while, that she would lose the closeness she'd always felt with him and that scared her more, even, than Billy Johnson trying to force himself on her. With the tuition taken care of in the form of a mysterious scholarship, Cloud's transfer to this new school was cinched and the twins were separated by more than just a few walls for the first time in their lives.
With Cloud gone, Star was left at a loss as to what to do with herself. She lived for the phone calls from New York, trying to keep her absent brother talking as much as possible so that she could almost feel like they're still together, but a phone call just isn't the same as being face to face. The remaining Rosen twin finally turned to her best friend for comfort as the weeks passed, spending more time than ever with Jamie and her other friends. She tried to fit in with her friends, but it just wasn't the same as before. When she heard about Cloud's troubles, first with demons and then with some /freak/ that carved a message into his chest and screwed with his brain and left her brother unable to control the powers that he left to learn /how/ to control, she became furious with the Institute, his teachers, and especially the head master.
Maybe /that's/ why she was so surprised when the same representative from the Xavier Institute contacted the Rosen family again and offered an 'open spot' to the other twin. The story was that Cloud could 'use some family around' after his abduction and that it was thought that his sister would be the best for the job. Especially since she's the same age he is and would be in many of the same classes and welcome to live at the mansion. There was even a scholarship that would cover /her/ tuition if that was the only thing holding the family back from allowing both of their youngest children to attend school out of state.
Now, Star is getting settled in at the Institute, trying to find her niche and getting reconnected with her brother. Boy is she in for a surprise when she finds out that she's going to have to do training to learn how to control some powers of her own that she wasn't even aware of. Although… Mysterious powers /do/ explain why her friends moods always seem to echo her own.
