Jean.
| Real Name: | Jean Grey-Summers |
| Former Aliases: | Marvel Girl I, Redd Dayspring |
| X | X |
| Height: | 5‘ 6“ |
| Weight: | 115 lbs. |
Hair color: | Red |
| Eyes: | Green |
| X | X |
| First appearance: | X-Men (1st series) #1 |
| Joined the X-Men in: | X-Men (1st series) #1 |
| Last appearance: | X-Men: Phoenix - Endsong XXX#5 (departed to another XXXplane of existence) |
| X | X |
| Known Relatives: | Elaine Grey (mother, deceased), Sara Grey-Bailey (sister, deceased), Paul Bailey (brother-in-law), Gailyn Bailey (niece, deceased), Joey Bailey (nephew, deceased), |
| Profession: | teacher, former photo model |
| Group Affiliation: | formerly X-Men, The Twelve, X-Factor, Seven Brides of Set, X-Terminators |
| Powers: |
Jean Grey is the second child college professor John Grey and his wife Elaine. Growing up with her older sister, Sara, Jean had a happy childhood that abruptly came to an end when her best friend, Annie Richardson, was hit by a car. Barely ten years old, Jean held her dying friend in her arms. In that instant, her mutant power kicked in and she unwittingly read Annie‘s mind, as she slowly slipped away to death. Even though she didn’t understand her telepathy, Jean embraced Annie’s soul and tried to protect it from the darkness that was closing in, but there was nothing she could do. Annie died, and it seemed that a part of Jean died as well.
Afterwards, she became a withdrawn, almost haunted child, and none of the specialists that her parents consulted over the next three years were able to get Jean out of her depression. That changed when somebody told them of Professor Charles Xavier. 
He discovered that the girl was a mutant and not able to cope with her telepathy yet. Therefore, he decided to mentally block her access to it until she was mature enough to properly control it. He also helped Jean to realize her potential as a telekinetic and, while she continued to live with her parents, she would regularly meet with Xavier for training sessions, which technically makes her his first student (but not his first X-Man).
From time to time, Xavier would temporarily remove Jean’s mental blocks to see whether she was able to handle her telepathy yet. In one of these occasions, Jean established mental contact with a teenager living in an orphanage several hundred miles away. At the time, neither Jean nor the professor could have known that this boy by the name of Scott Summers would eventually hold a very special place in their hearts.
Years later, when the professor had already recruited four other mutants, one of them being Scott Summers aka Cyclops, Jean officially enrolled at Xavier’s school and joined the X-Men under the codename Marvel Girl. Only shortly afterwards, the team made its public debut, fighting Magneto. Inexperienced as they were, the X-Men were unable to capture him, but they at least managed to thwart his plans. 
From the moment they had been introduced to her, all the male X-Men heavily flirted with the young redhead, but soon the romantic tension gave way for some camaraderie and mutual friendships to evolve. 
Only Warren Worthington, aka the Angel, continued to show some more personal interest in Jean. However, she was more attracted to Scott Summers, who too harbored secret feelings for her but dared not show them since he was afraid of hurting her with his deadly optic beams. Additionally, he thought that his duties as the X-Men’s field leader would not allow a romantic relationship with a teammate.
As she constantly practiced using her telekinetic powers, Jean further improved and eventually reached the point where she could carry her own weight. Levitating herself, she was actually able to fly, even though it was only for short distances 
at first. After Jean officially graduated at Xavier’s school, her parents decided that she needed to get a college education, and they arranged for her to attend classes at Metro College in New York. Fortunately, that wasn’t too far a distance and Jean visited her friends at Xavier’s school on the weekends. Occasionally, she also helped out fighting some of the X-Men’s villains, whenever her time allowed it.
In college, Jean befriended a fellow student named Ted Roberts and, spending her time with him, Jean got over how much she missed being a part of the team. She even pondered if she could really live a life among normal humans as one of them, and leave the world of mutants and their seemingly constant battles behind. At some point, Ted confided in Jean that he was worried about his brother, Ralph, a scientist who seemed rather obsessed. Indeed, Ralph Roberts‘ latest invention, a battle suit made of cobalt similar to Iron Man’s armor, was
malfunctioning and affected his mind. As the Cobalt Man, he caused massive destruction, until the X-Men managed to shut the suit off. Obviously, during the incident, Ted figured out that Jean and Marvel Girl were one and the same, for when Ralph was kidnapped by a villain who wanted to use the scientist’s inventions for himself, Ted called Jean and asked her to alert the X-Men. Although she did contact her teammates and they saved Ted’s brother a second time, Jean neither confirmed nor denied her secret identity.
Around the same time, Warren got together with Candy Southern, an old childhood friend, and he stopped flirting with Jean. Not willing to lose Jean to any other man again, Scott opened up to Jean about his difficulties with expressing emotions. Jean understood that he was trying to say that he loved her and Scott realized that she was feeling the same way without them actually talking about it. Their behavior towards each other grew more relaxed and they officially started dating each other.
When Professor Xavier was kidnapped by the mysterious group called Factor Three, Jean apparently returned to the X-Men on a full-time basis. At least she did not seem to be attending classes at Metro College anymore, after the X-Men had tracked their mentor down and rescued him. Xavier was so proud of his students‘ performance that, in the aftermath of that adventure, he allowed the X-Men to wear individual costumes, each of which Jean had personally designed.
Learning of an upcoming alien invasion, Professor Xavier knew that he would have to prepare against this attack in isolation. Not wanting to leave the X-Men on their own, 
he had the former villain known as the Changeling take his place. He also re-opened Jean‘s mental blocks to re-store her access to her telepathic powers, and taught her how to use them in a series of excessive training sessions. Naturally, the other X-Men were suspicious, especially when Marvel Girl refused to accompany the X-Men on some of their missions just to participate in Xavier’s “important experiments.“ Jean was not happy with this arrangement either but, as she was the only X-Man who knew of the exchange, she was forced to keep Xavier’s plan secret, even after the Changeling was killed in action.
In the wake of “Xavier’s“ death, the X-Men‘s governmental liaison, federal agent Fred Duncan, ordered the team to disband and 
spread their activities. Whereas some of the X-Men were assigned to operate in California, Jean stayed in New York, where she started a modeling career. This served as a cover for whatever superhero missions she would go on, as well as a reason for her family why she didn’t move back in with them. Scott also remained on the East Coast as a radio moderator, and occasionally acted as Jean’s overjealous boyfriend, to give her cover more credibility.
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Together with their mentor, the X-Men succeeded in driving the aliens away from Earth and later they teamed up with the Fantastic Four to end the Z’Nox threat once and for all. For the X-Men, it was the first time they were in space and, during this flight in the Fantastic Four’s ship, Jean couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being watched. Indeed, she was scanned by a universal Force. 
and Xavier quickly recruited a new team, who managed to rescue them. In the aftermath of that crisis, with their now being new members to carry on the dream, Marvel Girl and most of the other senior X-Men decided to leave and pursue some other interests of theirs. One of Jean‘s reasons was that she involuntarily found herself attracted to new member, Wolverine, and she feared that she would yield if she stayed near him much longer. Even though she hoped that Scott would leave together with her, he opted to stay and train the new group. 
was in charge of the United Nation’s Starcore project. He quickly organized a space shuttle and piloted the mutants to the Sentinel inhabited base in Earth’s orbit. While they managed to free Jean and several other X-Men that had been abducted, the flight back turned out to be problematic. The shuttle’s shielding was damaged; yet they had to pass cosmic radiation and solar flare activity. Jean reasoned that she alone stood a chance to survive by trying to filter out the radiation with a telekinetic shield; therefore she telepathically absorbed Corbeau’s knowledge to fly the ship and ordered everyone else into the life-cell, a specially shielded chamber in the rear area of the craft. However, the strain of piloting the shuttle and keeping her telekinetic powers up at full force was too strenuous, and ten minutes into the flight radiation began to pass through.
new name. Looking at the original Jean‘s near-dead body in front of her, she became confused, however.
Xavier for lunch, but the happy meeting ended up being interrupted by Firelord, a former herald of Galactus. To protect those she loved, Jean had no choice but to reveal herself as a mutant in front of her parents. During the battle with Firelord, Jean was as surprised as he that she managed to stand her ground against a cosmically powered herald. Obviously, she displayed a much higher power level compared to her days as “plain“ Marvel Girl. For all her power, though, she realized too late that Firelord merely provided a distraction for another villain kidnapping Lilandra, an alien Shi’ar princess, whom Xavier had just befriended. Fortunately, Phoenix was able to re-activate the stargate that the Shi’ar agent had used, so that the X-Men could follow him.
Soon thereafter, the X-Men were hypnotized by Mesmero into believing themselves to be a 
circus crew. Phoenix worked as the trapeze artist named Miz Destiny. Not having heard from his friends in quite a while, The Beast went looking for them and eventually tracked them down. He was able to snap his friends out of the trance but not before Magneto had taken advantage of the situation and abducted the entire group to his sub-Antarctic headquarter. There, a battle between Phoenix and Magneto damaged the base’s structure and earthquakes and molten lava separated Jean and Beast from the rest of the team. Believing the others to be dead, Jean created a tunnel to the frozen wasteland above where she and Hank were spotted by the pilots of a military helicopter. After returning home, Phoenix had the unpleasant task of informing Xavier of her teammates‘ death. 
her in many different guises and, presenting himself as a handsome stranger, he even introduced himself to Jean when she went shopping in a nearby town. Slowly but surely, Mastermind began to influence the unsuspecting woman with his illusions. For a few seconds, reality would shift and she found herself in some late 18th century setting, wearing the typical clothes of the time and apparently in love with Sir Jason Wyngarde, the attractive guise in which the villain had approached Jean. 
Upon arriving in Scotland, the X-Men found Phoenix unconscious. Cyclops immediately tended to his lover but, in her dazed state, she addressed him as Jason, the man she kept seeing in her visions. Once, Proteus was defeated, Cyclops and Phoenix made up with each other. He explained that after her apparent death he did not allow himself to feel anything at all, fearing that he would go insane over his loss. Scott even admitted to have dated another woman shortly afterwards, to which Jean replied that it was okay, as she would want him to be with someone else once she was gone. However, Phoenix was not as open as Cyclops and she continued to keep her timeshift episodes secret, even though they were happening more and more often. 
Jason Wyngarde and immediately was hit by another 18th century illusion, in which she ended up marrying Jason Wyngarde. After the ceremony, Jason presented Jean to the wedding guests as the new Black Queen of the Hellfire Club. The illusion at an end, Jean and her friends learned that the other half of the X-Men, contacting the second new mutant, Kitty Pryde, had been taken captive by a woman named White Queen and other operatives of this same-said Hellfire Club. When Phoenix and the White Queen fought each other, it seemed at first that their telepathic powers were equally matched. However, once she spotted her opponent‘s weaknesses, Jean showed no mercy and hospitalized the White Queen for the next months. Phoenix also used her power irresponsibly when she “convinced“ the parents of Kitty Pryde to let her enroll at Xavier‘s school. 
As the Black Queen of the Hellfire Club‘s Inner Circle, she helped to capture all the other X-Men, who in the illusionary world she was trapped in were rebellious slaves and unpleasant servants to Jean‘s role as an 18th century noble woman. Through their psi-bond, Cyclops managed to enter the illusion, only to be confronted and killed by Jason Wyngarde on the astral plane. Seeing her true love “die,“ Jean snapped out of the trance she was in and freed her teammates. While the other X-Men fought the rest of the Hellfire Club, she took a most cruel revenge on Mastermind, making his mind one with the universe, overloading his sensory input.
lusting for power, she transformed into Dark Phoenix during the flight back home to Xavier’s mansion. In this state, she had no moral code anymore. Easily over-powering her fellow X-Men, she took off to the stars. In the matter of seconds, she left the Milky Way behind and reached other galaxies deep in space. Soaring through the universe at this incredible speed, however, Dark Phoenix needed more energy. Passing D’Bari, a star of approximately the same size as Earth’s sun, she decided that this would do just fine and entirely consumed it without a thought of the consequences. Her actions doomed the entire D’Bari systems, as the planets and all their inhabitants were scorched when the sun went super-nova. Five billion people died, but their deaths were recorded by the crew of a Shi’ar vessel close by.
The joyful moment was interrupted by the Shi’ar, who filled the X-Men in on what Dark Phoenix had done while she was in space. Classifying her as a threat to the whole universe, the aliens demanded her death and the X-Men had to engage the Shi’ar Imperial guard in a duel over Jean’s fate. The Blue Area of the moon served as a battleground for this duel but, unfamiliar with the powers of many of their opponents, the X-Men didn’t fare too well. After all her teammates had been defeated, Phoenix’s cosmic power levels resurfaced. With her last strength of will before succumbing again to the dark influence inside of her, Jean used her telekinesis to activate an alien weapon to vaporize herself.
learning along the way that she was building rooms for the souls of the many people she had killed. Death, however, reminded her that she had also saved countless lives before that. Next, he explained the connection between Jean and the Phoenix Force, and also revealed the Force had had a hand in Jean’s telepathic contact with Scott back when they were children. It was all pre-ordained; Jean‘s connection to Xavier’s school, Scott family history with the Shi’ar and the two of them falling in love with each other all were required elements to ensure that, in the time of need, the X-Men and the Force’s avatar, Phoenix, would be there to stop D’Ken from destroying the entire universe. As she departed from the afterlife, Death knew that Phoenix still needed to learn and grow more responsible. Unfortunately, though, he was also aware that she wouldn’t remember his words. 
took it with them for further examination. The Fantastic Four, who were currently residing at Avengers Mansion, offered to help. The Invisible Woman‘s power allowed the heroes to take a look at the woman inside the cocoon but, never having met Jean out of costume, they didn’t recognize her. Mr. Fantastic concluded that she was in some form of suspended animation, so he probed the cocoon with bio-stimulators to awaken her. Unfortunately, this probing took a toll on the psi-sensitive Jean, inhibiting her telepathic powers for months to come. On the other hand, it increased her telekinetic abilities. When the hull cracked and Jean emerged, she was totally disoriented, and it took her and the assembled heroes a while to figure out what truly happened on the shuttle flight. Jean chose not to inform her family of her return yet, after all they believed her long dead and she didn’t quite know how to explain her return to them. 
Instead, Mr. Fantastic suggested they call Jean‘s former teammate, the Angel, as he was one of the few X-Men whose civilian identity was publicly known. After meeting Jean, Warren alerted Scott, which led to a happy reunion. However, Jean was somewhat disappointed that her former teammates had both retired, even though anti-mutant hysteria was rising. She even accused them of having abandoned Xavier’s dream, considering that the X-Men were now in Magneto’s care. Thus rattled by Jean, did the original X-Men decided to reunite and form a new group called X-Factor. While the media believed them to be mutant hunters, X-Factor secretly tried to find, train and help new mutants. To do so, they took on two roles: officially they were mutant hunters. But when necessary, they also took on the roles of the X-Terminators, masked mutants who seemed to be in opposition to X-Factor. 
distracted all the time, and she felt that he was keeping something secret from her. Eventually, he had a slip of tongue and called her "Maddie“ and Jean pushed the truth out of her teammates – during the time she was believed dead, Scott had gotten married. The fact that Scott had hidden this from her hurt Jean more than the marriage itself, as she would have wanted her lover to move on after her death. Asking Cyclops if he had a picture of his wife, she also discovered not only that Madelyne looked exactly liked her, but also that she and Scott even had a child together. 
Jean was touched that sister still stood up for mutants, despite the things that Phoenix had done in Jean’s name. At the same time, though, she was also worried that her sister might be making herself a target for all mutant haters, so she and Cyclops decided to visit her. Arriving at Sara’s house, they found it emptied of all personal effects and without any sign of the whereabouts of Sara and her family. Moments later, they received a threatening phone call and the place was firebombed as well. While Scott and Jean escaped unharmed, any potential clues to Sara’s whereabouts were destroyed. 
directed her last words to her husband, telling him to find their missing son, Christopher. The X-Men’s death made Jean think of others close to her and so she finally visited her parents to let them know she was alive. 
Sinister had then programmed Madelyne to fall in love with Scott Summers, as he wanted to make use of their potentially quite powerful offspring.
that she killed herself and forced Jean into a mental bond, trying to drag her down into death with her. In order to survive, Jean was forced to reintegrate the portion of soul, essence and life-force of herself that from Phoenix II had gone to Maddie, the portion which she had previously subconsciously rejected. Along with it, she also got Madelyne’s and Phoenix’s memories and personalities too. Having barely had time to digest all that happened, Jean found herself under a psychic attack by Mr. Sinister. After losing the clone, he now wanted the original, and therefore attempted to erase Jean‘s memories while she was in a vulnerable state with the intention to later reprogram her in his image. With the help of Psylocke, Cyclops and Storm entered Jean’s mind and convinced her splintered personalities to fight back and drive Mr. Sinister from her mind. 
and Madelyne’s personality also surfaced, once again trying to force the body to commit suicide. As if this wasn’t already enough to deal with, X-Factor eventually found themselves on a war-torn planet that was about to be judged by the Celestials. Separated from each other, the various members aided some rivaling native factions, and the constant switching back and forth between the three personalities left Jean nigh catatonic. 
When they were reunited, Cyclops helped the Jean side to focus and gain some control. She then acted as a vessel to all the natives‘ souls and will-power, which were to be unleashed against the Celestials. However, she feared that wielding that much power would cause the Phoenix persona inside her to succumb to the dark side again. That’s why she released the vast energies into Cyclops, who acted as some sort of lens to fire this energy at the Celestials. It was enough to make the powerful aliens leave the planet, for it to be judged again when they would visit next. While celebrating their victory, Jean discovered that, with the blast, the personalities of Madelyne and Phoenix had been purged from her system. Only their memories remained, though not as if she had lived them but more like faded stories. 
After she came back to the team, Scott reassured Jean that he understood her reasons and they agreed to forget about the proposal. 
Several months later, X-Factor found themselves under attack by the Dark Riders, agents of Apocalypse. One of their number, the telepath Psynapse, attacked Jean, mentally tortured her and rifled through her memories. In the process, he made Jean relive the death of her childhood friend, Annie. The traumatic event that had once before catalyzed her latent telepathic powers now did so again, allowing her to take Psynapse out. 
However, now the techno-organic virus was spreading again, and could only be held in check with telekinesis. Under the aliases of Redd and Slym, Jean and Scott raised the boy, who one day would become Cable, and taught him how to use his powers to keep the virus in check. The lived together as a happy family for about twelve years, until the day that Mother Askani, Rachel’s alias in that time, died of old age. Her last act was the request of Jean to take on the codename “Phoenix,“ since, to her, a lot of good was attached to the name and she wanted it restored. Then, the couple was sent back in time to their rightful bodies. 
Sensing that he was in trouble, Jean tracked him to the Swiss Alps and found him in the company of Madelyne Pryor. Nate had unwittingly resurrected Jean’s rival, by given her psionic ghost a corporal form. Immediately, Madelyne attacked Jean, and Nate was unsure what to do. When he learned of the full story, he sided with Jean and even tried to set things right by uncreating Madelyne, only to find that he could not. After she angrily left, Jean comforted Nate and offered her friendship. She even asked him to come back to the X-Men with her, but he wasn’t ready to make that decision yet. 
To ensure Scott‘s recovery, the couple quit the X-Men and moved to Alaska. However, after a while, Jean had Scott worried, as she slowly seemed to turn into the Phoenix. She began to wear the green Phoenix costume and, various times, manifested an energy signature that resembled the so-called Phoenix effect, a bird-shaped energy signature. Jean explained that for years she had suppressed her powers out of fear of becoming too powerful and being corrupted just like her cosmically empowered duplicate, but now, she considered herself ready to deal with increased power levels and she wanted to explore herself to become all that she could be. The costume was just a symbolic gesture to express this fresh start. 
Iceman, Storm and Sunfire provided elemental extremes, Cyclops, Phoenix and Cable gave the unity of family and the vast energies of the Summers bloodline, Xavier provided the power of mind, while Bishop and Mikhail represented control over time and space. The Living Monolith linked all their energies together. Nate Grey was to be Apocalypse's new host, a powerhouse to store his massive lifeforce. Before the transfer was complete, though, the Twelve managed to free themselves and Cyclops sacrificed his own body and lifeforce to keep Apocalypse from getting Nate. Jean was horrified to see Apocalypse fuse body and soul with her husband, Cyclops. This new gestalt being attempted to use the absorbed power of the Twelve to rewrite history at various crucial points in order to dominate the future. The X-Men, however, defeated the new Apocalypse, who then escaped. 
indeed, after a few months that she needed to mourn for Scott, Jean kept her word. However, the experiment misfired, resulting in a power-switch between the two women. While Jean lost her telekinesis to Psylocke, she added the other woman’s telepathic powers to her own, including her shadowy astral image. However, instead of Psylocke’s Crimson Dawn mark, Jean sported a small Phoenix logo over her eye. 
is what made her so special and what caused the fundamental forces of the universe to notice humanity. In Jean, the unlimited potential of mankind was met by the unquenchable desire to grow, as such representing a legitimate challenge to the fabric of reality itself. 
As various clues pointed to her husband still being alive and fighting the merger with Apocalypse, Jean and Cable embarked on a search for Cyclops. When they found the merged individual, he had reverted back to Scott Summers in appearance, no longer displaying any mutant powers and was amnesiac. In the final battle between many forces aligned either for or against Apocalypse, Jean managed to use her psi-bond with Scott to drag out Apocalypse’s essence and Cable disrupted it with his Psimitar, finally killing the multi-millennia-old villain. However, Scott’s and Jean’s psychic rapport also seemed to be disrupted as a result. 
regained access to her telekinetic abilities. When it came to her love life, though, things wouldn’t revert back to what they were before just as easily. While free of Apocalypse’s influence, the experience left Cyclops a changed man and he became more ruthless than before. Both of them being on the active roster of the X-Men again, the marriage started undergoing a strain, as Jean felt that Scott was keeping things and Scott was acting cooler towards her, even refusing to sleep with her. The fact that their new teammate, Emma Frost, was heavily flirting with Scott didn’t help much either.
When Professor Xavier (actually Cassandra Nova inhabiting his body) left to visit Lilandra in the Shi’ar Empire, Jean became acting headmistress of Xavier’s school. She was alone with the school’s many students when the mansion was attacked by the U-Men, a radical group who dissected mutants to gain their organs and powers. In her battle with them, Jean displayed incredible telekinetic powers - both when it came to raw power as well as fine motor control. She managed to catch the U-Men’s projectiles in mid air and arranged them in a beautiful pattern, before moving the content of their stomachs up and down until they had to throw up. Obviously, she was tapping into the Phoenix Force, as she burst into flame. Disarmed, beaten and humiliated, the U-Men ran away screaming, just as Wolverine returned from the mission he was on. When he saw Jean, he couldn’t help but recall Dark Phoenix and wondered whether the woman he secretly loved was headed down the same road.
as the results confirmed that she could do things that Jean shouldn’t be capable of. Halfway through the experiment, he also found another personality in Jean – apparently the Phoenix Force speaking through its chosen host and avatar. The Force believed itself to be the last hope against something terrible happening in the future. What that role Phoenix exactly was to play remained unclear, though. A few days later, however, the Shi’ar put Earth under quarantine as they noted “toxic“ aggression levels among Earth’s mutants. Before leaving, though, they hinted that nature would deal with that problem: “The Phoenix has hatched – and she is terrible.” 
Eventually returning to the mansion in Westchester, Jean caught Scott and Emma in the psychic act, so to speak. Furiously, she used her powers to tear through Emma’s mind demanding to know whether she and Scott had actually slept together and, along the way, punished the other woman by making Emma face some uncomfortable truths about herself. Scott finally put a stop to this, showing Jean that they had done nothing before he stormed out angrily. 
of the asteroid to create them a craft that brought them back to Earth. Along with the other X-Men, they confronted a Magneto imposter who had been posing as the X-Man known as Xorn. As his last act, “Xorneto” sent all his energy into Phoenix causing a stroke within her. Jean died in Cyclops arms, telling him all she ever did was die on him and urging him to live. 
After injecting himself with Phoenix DNA, the Beast sent her to erase several of his enemies, including the present-day X-Men. Among them were Wolverine, Cassandra Nova and the mutant brain, Martha Johannson, all of whom had survived from the present day. Accessing the Shi’ar files on Phoenix, Cassandra and Martha discovered how to briefly separate Jean from the Phoenix consciousness. It was long enough for Jean to remember her true identity and purpose. Quite horrified, she learned from Logan what happened in her absence. Heart-broken after her death, Scott had left the school and, while the Beast tried his best to keep the Xavier Institute open, he ultimately wasn’t wasn't capable of handling all the responsibility that had been thrust on him. Eventually, he began taking the drug Kick to cope with the pressure and, as a result, Hank became the new host body for Sublime, the sentient microscopic lifeform who existed in aerosol form within Kick.
separated the rogue intelligent bacterial colony from the Beast’s body and burned it out of reality - by amputating the entire future. Her work done, she returned to the so-called White Hot Room, where she was expected by an army of Phoenixes – although as a “white Phoenix of the crown” she apparently played a special role. Jean learned that she could build a new future, but she would have to water it with her heartblood. As that particular future had been made possible because 150 years earlier Cyclops had refused Emma Frost and her offer to reopen Xavier’s school together, Jean reached back through time to her funeral. Urging Scott to “live,” Jean made him choose Emma, thus opening another path for the future. 
It being common knowledge among the Shi’ar that the Phoenix Force always comes back, a group of renegades caused it to return incomplete and way before its time. They intended to destroy the Force once and for all with a new experimental weapon, but one tiny spark of the Phoenix remained and escaped to Earth. Taking on a humanoid shape, the Force approached Jean’s grave, animated her body and made her dig herself out. Despite Jean’s protests, the Force fully restored her body and entered it. Struggling for control, Jean had Wolverine kill her time and again, further weakening the Force, before burying herself deep underneath the frozen sea in the Arctic region.
Thus grounded to her human roots, Jean got a handle on her new status. At that point, the Shi’ar launched their weapon again, creating a miniature black hole to get rid of the Phoenix. Jean threw herself in the way of the blast, saving her friends and teammates. About to depart to the afterlife once again, Jean admitted that she was scared and asked Scott to let her see his eyes a final time. As he took off his visor, Scott reminded her that no matter where she would go or how much she would grow, she should always remember that, deep down, she is Jean Grey.