The second character introduced in Metamorphosis is clearly Alice Hernandez, portrayed by Carmen Serano. In Runaways, the Hernandezes have been dead for a while, possibly murdered by Tina Minoru, but we got to see them in a flashback picturing the first Blood Rite of The Pride, an experience that apparently led Alice and her husband to rebel to the mysterious Jonah, paying the consequences. In the comics, Alice Hayes, not Hernandez, would have never rebelled to the Pride, being on the opposite one of the most enthusiast participants to the Rite of Blood. Let’s see together.
Alice Hayes was born a mutant, and she developed telepathy when she was still very young. Possibly, Gene was her brother, and the two got married in order to maintain their blood “pure”. She studied medicine and became a speech therapist, and she lived in Los Angeles with her husband. Unlike Gene, Alice at first believed it was possible to live with humans despite their differences, but as the racial tensions were made unbearable by the discussion on the Mutant Registration Act, the Hayeses’ very neighbors attacked them just because they were mutants. Alice begged them to stop, reminding them they used to be good neighbors, but nobody listened. Just before Gene could retaliate on the crowd, the two mutants were teleported to a lost city by the Gibborim, ancient deities who required their service. Together with other five summoned couples, the Hayeses would have killed one person per year to strengthen the Gibborim and allow their return, and in exchange they would have had power and wealth for twenty-five years, and six thrones in Utopia, the new immortal world the Gibborim would have founded after destroying the old one. Still hurt and increasingly angry for what had happened at her home, Alice accepted, and so did Gene. The Gibborim, true to their word, made them two of the most powerful telepaths on Earth, even more powerful when they combined their powers. Their ability was enough to attract the attention of the Hellfire Club, that invited them to join the Inner Circle, but they refused: they were members of The Pride, and they were committed to destroy the world, not to change it.
With her power boosted, Alice and Gene acted as the enforcers of The Pride, slaughtering a number of enemies (humans, of course) who dared to trespass in The Pride’s territory. They were even tasked with keeping the victims of the Blood Rite sedated during the ritual, and to erase the memory of unkillable witnesses. When Janet Stein got pregnant, the members of The Pride decided to have a child each, in order to leave the places in Utopia to them. Alice tried for years, but she seemed unable to conceive a child; finally, some six-seven years after all the others, she had a baby girl, Molly. She deeply and truly cared for her daughter, and she even moved to make a secret deal with Frank and Leslie Dean, the two aliens of the group, to kill the human members of The Pride and let the two couples, with their daughters Molly and Katerina, inherit Utopia. As present and caring as Alice was, however, she failed to recognize in Molly’s cramps, that she took for signs of her puberty, the signals of her X-Gene kicking in, as she didn’t suspect her daughter to be a mutant as well. The moment Molly tried to tell her about her super-strength, Alice used her telepathy to induce sleep in her, believing her daughter wanted to speak of her first menstrual cycle: she had more urgent matters, as some of the kids had witnessed the last Blood Rite and had been stealing equipment and weapons from their parents’ houses. Alice had agreed to use Molly as bait to lure them out, but when they did The Pride was caught off-guard by the young ones’ talents, and Alice herself was knocked out by Nico Minoru and her Staff of One. Ironically, being senseless prevented Alice to witness her daughter’s first display of power against The Pride…something that would have truly made her proud.
Alice Hayes is a strong and caring mother for Molly and a faithful and supportive wife for Gene…but she’s also a mutant supremacist and a genocidal maniac, a cruel assassin who doesn’t hesitate in taking a human life, man, woman or child. She’s a remarkably powerful telepath, who gladly uses her abilities to torture her enemies before killing them. Made even more committed in her racial war by the sufferings she had to endure when she still believed in a peaceful coexistence, Alice Hayes is a dangerous mutant terrorist, a mass-murderer who will gladly see the world in ashes just to punish the hated humanity…