BIOGRAPHY - Page 10
That next thing ended up being a new line of work for Alison. Maria Hill, the director of S.H.I.E.L.D. at that time, was struggling to understand the state of mutant affairs and decided she needed a “man on the inside” to help her figure out who the good guys and bad guys were, so to speak. In particular, she found Cyclops’ recent affiliation with Magneto troubling and struggled to understand it. She reached out to Alison and pitched the position to her. Dazzler, intrigued by being an official Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., accepted the offer to act as her mutant affairs liaison. [Uncanny X-Men (3rd series) #6]
Her first task was to find where Cyclops was now hiding, after his recent dabbling with the Phoenix Force and his murder of Charles Xavier. She found a young mutant named Fabio who had recently had contact with him and visited him at his home in San Diego. The visit didn’t go as planned. Not only did Fabio’s father freak out and pull a gun on Dazzler, but Fabio’s sister actually 
recognized Alison and pulled out an old Dazzler record and asked her to sign it. Both embarrassed by the recognition and annoyed by the gun in her face, Alison took the record, put it on the player and used her powers to unleash a “flash-bang” that knocked everyone in the house — and in the streets outside — unconscious. She then took Fabio “Goldballs” Medina into S.H.I.E.L.D. custody, where she interrogated him and asked where Scott Summers took him.
Resentful at being arrested, Medina was noncompliant and insisted Cyclops didn’t kidnap him (though he insisted S.H.I.E.L.D. did). Unfortunately for Alison, her interrogation came to an abrupt end when their helicarrier was boarded by Cyclops and his X-Men, who came to retrieve Goldballs. After exchanging insults, Alison rejected their offer to join their faction, and they fled with Goldballs. Later, Dazzler was in her room lamenting her failure of a first mission when a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent arrived with some coffee to cheer her up. The coffee, however, turned out to be drugged, and the agent turned out to be none other than Mystique. As Dazzler fell unconscious, Mystique told her she was a big fan of her music and not to take what came next personally, as it was all part of a larger plan. [Uncanny X-Men (3rd series) #8-9]
Mystique was infuriated at Dazzler for working with S.H.I.E.L.D. and, like Scott and Illyana, considered her a traitor to her own people (or, in her own words, a “sellout dirty whore”). 
Therefore, she didn’t feel bad at all about what she did to Dazzler: rendering her unconscious and using her body to harvest Mutant Growth Hormone, which she sold to depowered mutants as a way of funding her new operations on Madripoor with Sabretooth. While Dazzler was blindfolded and shackled to a bed, Mystique mimicked her appearance and replaced her as an Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. while she worked to dismantle the organization from the inside. Dazzler was held in captivity and mined for MGH for an extended period of time. It was Magneto who finally found her and freed her, after he followed the Blob on Madripoor and found him sneaking into Dazzler’s chambers for a quick MGH fix. Disgusted at what Mystique and her cohorts were doing to a fellow mutant, Magneto threatened Blob, freed Dazzler and took her back to Cyclops’s X-Men.
Alison, meanwhile, was furious at what Mystique had done to her. After recovering with the help of a mutant healer, she accompanied Cyclops and the X-Men to their current confrontation with S.H.I.E.L.D. happening outside the Jean Grey School. She assisted them with defending their school from a Sentinel attack, after which Maria Hill told her she was under arrest. The enraged Dazzler explained that Mystique had kidnapped and impersonated her, which made sense to Maria Hill. Hill then reminded Dazzler that she was still an Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., at which Dazzler scoffed. At that point, she resigned, as this whole ordeal reminded her that she was a mutant and, more importantly, an X-Man. She left S.H.I.E.L.D. and joined Cyclops’ X-Men. [Uncanny X-Men (3rd series) #19-22]
Alison immediately wanted revenge on Mystique and traveled to Madripoor with her new teammates to track her down. However, the wound was so fresh and she was so unstable that all she succeeded in doing was unleashing a flash of her powers and breaking down in the street. Magik, Magneto and Emma informed her they wanted nothing more than to find Mystique so they could watch Alison beat the crap out of her, but they reminded her that the mutant shapeshifter was wily and not so easy to track down. Later, back at the X-Men’s secret headquarters, Dazzler had a breakdown in the bathroom. Enraged and frustrated over everything that had happened to her, she stripped away her clothing, cut her hair and donned a completely new, darker, edgier costume. Beast commented on this new look when she ran into him at the Jean Grey School, and rejected his offer to come join the faculty there. She said she was too angry to come teach music appreciation and wanted nothing more than to get Mystique. [Uncanny X-Men (3rd series) #23-24]
The time for her revenge came soon enough. Dazzler met with Agent Hill aboard a S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier and asked to see their files on Mystique so she could track her down. Hill said she could see them if she were a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, at which point Dazzler reminded her she never actually fired her and that she never officially quit, so she was still technically an agent. They made a deal: Dazzler would get Mystique for S.H.I.E.L.D. if Hill agreed to purge the records of the students at Cyclops’ school from their system. Hill agreed, though she refused to purge Cyke’s and Emma’s records. After clearing that up, Dazzler started looking at their records on Mystique and something clicked: she knew where she was.
Dazzler and the X-Men tracked down Mystique while she was masquerading as a Bollywood star in Delhi, India. Using a combination of her light-based illusion powers and the Stepford Cuckoos telepathy, Dazzler disguised herself as Cyclops and broke into Mystique’s penthouse and greeted her when she came home. A brief conversation ensued in which Mystique tried to seduce “Cyclops” before tricking him into revealing that he wasn’t, in fact, Cyclops. At that point, however, it was too late for Mystique. By the time Dazzler’s illusion dropped, she and her friends had Mystique completely trapped. Hijack rendered the gun she held useless and the Cuckoos paralyzed her. At that point, Dazzler unleashed her powers and blew Mystique out of the high-rise window. She was gracious, though, and had Magik teleport her to the ground to safety instead of letting her fall to her death. On the street, Mystique remarked that, if she were in Alison’s shoes, she would’ve killed Mystique for what she did to her, and called her the better person for it. Alison simply told Mystique that she was trying to teach Cyclops’s former students a lesson in doing the right thing.
Later, with Mystique safely in S.H.I.E.L.D. captivity, Dazzler kicked back and performed a concert for the first time in months. Dressed in her new punk-inspired attire, she put on a show at a concert venue, which most of the X-kids attended. After the show, she was enjoying a drink in her changing room backstage when she received a visit from Maria Hill (who was also an admitted fan of Dazzler’s music). Maria offered Alison her job back with S.H.I.E.L.D. She reiterated that there were new mutants popping up in the world everyday who would need a figure like Dazzler to look out for them, and that Cyclops would never be that figure. [Uncanny X-Men (3rd series) #34]