Lockheed

Lockheed Lockheed has been around long enough in what I've read that it's easy to forget how strange his introduction actually is. Kitty meets this little purple dragon while the X-Men are caught up in the Brood story. They're dealing with alien creatures that can take people over, and this small, fire-breathing creature turns out to be on their side. He first appears in Uncanny X-Men #166. By #168, Kitty discovers that he made it back to Earth with them. He's been hiding around the mansion, and his reappearance comes with another alien problem: the Sidri beneath the building. Kitty, Lockheed and Colossus deal with that threat, and he stays. That means his relationship with Kitty starts with them surviving things together. He can fly, breathe fire and get into places a much larger teammate can't. His size makes him easy to overlook, but it also makes him useful. An enemy concentrating on the person in front of them can still have a dragon coming at them from another direction. The name has a nice connection to Kitty's earlier fairy tale. She had already told a story involving a dragon called Lockheed before she met the real one. There's a difference between that imaginary dragon and the actual alien who joins her, but the name carries across. Something that belonged to one of her stories becomes part of her everyday life. And there's always a question of how much everybody else understands him. Xavier can't simply read his mind the way he can read a human mind. Kitty forms a close bond with him, but that doesn't mean the rest of the team has a complete explanation of his background or what he's thinking. They can recognize his intelligence through what he does without having all those answers. His relationship with Kitty is the center of it, though. He travels with her, reacts to the people around her and develops his own attachments. The artwork has to carry a lot of those interactions through expressions, posture and movement. A look from Lockheed can become part of a conversation even when the humans are doing most of the talking. He also gets adventures that extend beyond sitting beside Kitty. The original Nightcrawler miniseries puts him and Kurt into another dimension, with pirates, sorcery and Bamfs. That gives the two of them a chance to function together in a very different setting. Kurt's attitude toward an adventure like that and Lockheed's ability to join in make a natural combination. Then he continues into Excalibur with Kitty. Moving to a different team doesn't erase everything they already went through. Kitty and Kurt bring their experiences as X-Men with them, and Lockheed is part of that shared history. Around the lighthouse, he also fits into the smaller interactions that make the group feel like people living together rather than only gathering when something attacks. The larger cast keeps changing, but Kitty and Lockheed have this ongoing familiarity. She can be dealing with school, a fight, another country or another dimension, and he's still someone she knows. At the point I'm reading, there's already enough history between them that leaving him out of a discussion about Kitty would leave out a real part of her life.