Cassandra Nova is a supervillain appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics, most commonly in association with the X-Men. Created by writer Grant Morrison and artist Frank Quitely, Cassandra first appeared in New X-Men #114 (July 2001). Cassandra is a "mummudrai," a parasitic life form born bodiless on the astral plane. The mummudrai that became Cassandra became telepathically entangled with the future Charles Xavier, who possesses vast mutant telepathic powers. This granted Cassandra some psionic powers herself, including the ability to exit the womb and create a body. Cassandra is Xavier's ideological dark shadow, bent on destruction and genocide. She is most infamous for commanding an army of Sentinels to massacre 16 million mutants within the mutant homeland of Genosha. In 2009, Cassandra Nova was ranked as IGN's 50th Greatest Comic Book Villain of All Time, the only villain from the 21st century to make the list. Fictional character biography Origins Cassandra Nova began life at the same time as Charles Xavier. Conceived without a body, Cassandra improvised one by copying Xavier's DNA to make her own body, effectively becoming his twin sister. She grew with her brother until she had fully formed hands and eyes, when she decided to try to kill Charles by attempting to strangle him with his own umbilical cord. Charles defended himself by hitting her with a psychic blast, which caused his mother to have a miscarriage, resulting in her physical body being stillborn. Despite this, the creature survived as chaotic cellular matter that clung to a sewer wall for decades, rebuilding its physical form and perfecting its effort to mimic human traits. During this time, she grew convinced that the womb in which she had fought Charles and the universe she now inhabited were one and the same, a universe in which only she and Charles were real, and that her purpose was to destroy every illusion Charles held dear: his dream, his X-Men, and his beloved Lilandra. Jean Grey later discovered that Cassandra Nova is the mummudrai (from a Shi'ar legend, meaning 'opposite') of Charles Xavier. "Legend says each of us faces our own personal mummudrai in the womb, shortly before birth - it is our first experience of the alien, the other, the different." In reality, the mummudrai are a parasitic species born bodiless on the astral plane, and it was only through becoming entangled with Charles Xavier's developing telepathic