Chain 216: X-Men Cinematic

Chain 216: X-Men Cinematic

Location: Xavier's Institute For Gifted Youngsters
Age: 24
Identity: Drop-In
Drawbacks: [+600] Dudepeel No More, Mysterious Past, Mutant Registration, Making Waves
Scenario: [+200] Natural Selection

[Free]      Do I Owe You Money?
[200/1600]  Don't You Know Who I Am?
[500/1600]  The Brotherhood
[500/2000]  Power Stipend (+400)
[1100/2000] Technopathy (Alpha)
[1900/2000] Power Amplification (Omega)
[2000/2000] Put Together A Team: Demona and the Conspiracy
[Scenario Reward]  Power boost: Technopathy (Omega)

You know, there are an awful lot of circumstances where I'd be in favor of taking extensive measures to deal with unusual threats, but quite frankly... most of what gets dealt with in this particular universe isn't so bad that full-blown "force all the mutants to register!" makes much sense to me. Sure, I understand that people who don't have unusual abilities would have varying degrees of paranoia over those with abilities... but we're talking one out of every two hundred people on the planet could potentially be a mutant. I'm sure most keep it hidden, but whatever it is with this world, they're starting to come out of the woodwork. Or perhaps they always were a thing and now they weren't bothering to hide as much.

Naturally, showing up at Xavier's mansion in Westchester out of nowhere results in me being viewed with suspicion at best when I walk up to the door. I'd apparently shown up on the heels of another two individuals who'd come here for refuge. After making the point that I was a mutant as well, I introduced myself as having been dropped in from an alternate universe, and asked what the local landscape looked like.

It turns out that Mystique not killing Bolivar Trask was a mistake.

I'd landed in the Days of Future Past timeline, where Mystique did not in fact kill him. When Nixon was impeached, Trask was released, and rebuilt his political acumen and his company. From there... well, more vocal anti-mutant propaganda plus viable anti-mutant machines equals mandatory registration. Sentinels were a fact of life. Magneto had gone underground, with no one having seen him for decades since, though he was number one with a bullet on the FBI's most wanted list. The Xavier Institute flew under the radar through a combination of a handful of well-placed sympathetic people, bribes, and the occasional mind-whammy.

And so I shrugged and said, "Well, I suppose that means I'm going to have to change the world." I left them a business card with Xavier, told him to call if any backup was ever desired or if he needed a substitute teacher, and went to register just as any dutiful citizen should - it seemed the registration was governed by the United Nations and backed by international treaties, and every city worldwide with a population over a quarter million had at least one registration office. Seems that when every nation has Sentinels breathing down their necks, it tends to reduce warfare and keep nations from having super soldiers.

When asked what my mutation permitted me to do, putting 'everything' on the form did not amuse them. I spent the next two hours demonstrating that I had a large range of abilities, at which point the geniuses decided they would arrest me for displaying mutant abilities. This, of course, went as well as one might imagine - I politely informed them that I would not be participating in their desire to earn a Darwin Award today, ignored their rather futile attempts to detain me, ignored the bullets they shot at me, and when they sent in the Sentinels I turned them into action figures.

From there... I decided to track down Magneto. It was not as easy as one might hope, but as it turned out, he and Mystique were planning on the turning a number of politicians into mutants. Familiar. I pointed out that this would not help their cause, and direct confrontation would be forced as a result, but I helped him with his machine, refined it with what I'd learned while studying the Eye of Ages. I subsequently exposed Magneto and Mystique to the Gem of Cyttorak, gave Magneto a further notable power boost as well thanks to my own mutation, and after his machine had been modified... we began deploying it.

With Magneto's power boosted to what I would call truly obscene levels, covering a city with the effect of his weapon was not particularly draining as it might have been. The results... once a week, a major city was blanketed by a glowing sphere of light. Some of the cities were in the United States, but it wasn't just there. Tokyo. Delhi. Jakarta. Manila. Shanghai. Millions and millions of people turned into mutants overnight, with paranoid minds trying to get them all to register.

Some nations descended into chaos.

Some nations put walls around the affected cities and tried to write them off as a loss.

Some nations tried to ruthlessly purge everyone affected.

Many did everything they could within their power to stop this. The X-Men... well, they could hardly step in, could they? That was illegal, after all.

The simple fact of the matter is, after a year of this, the global mutant population had grown nearly fifty-fold, and the inevitable happened when a madman set the Sentinels on automatic to wipe out mutants entirely. Escalation. But this was short-lived - with so many mutants, there were those who could see visions of the future, there were those with telepathic gifts that could coordinate many others... there were mutants from all walks of life, and they acted in concert. After the Madrid massacre, the mutants of the world fought back, and both Xavier and Magneto worked together to hold them together and keep them from indulging in excesses. The factories that produced Sentinels were attacked. Some attacks were successful, many were not, but the simple fact of the matter was that Sentinels were being destroyed in the field as well, and the factories couldn't produce more if they were deprived of the raw resources to make them. Eventually, even those that couldn't be stopped by other means were shut down.

After a long talk with Xavier and Magneto when the threat was finished and registration was openly mocked as a joke by politicians, I discussed further with them and it was arranged for the machines to be duplicated and for the efforts to keep going to bring mankind to a new age. When everyone is super, and all of that, and there were volunteers who were powerful enough to run the device, so seeing them fire in several different cities became a daily event.

At that point, I had gone public and was basically bringing the alien technologies used by En Sabah Nur to the world, so I had any number of people looking at me skeptically, even accusing me of being an alien. The connection was drawn between my appearance and everything happening, so certain governments were convinced that I was involved and wanted to seize what I had for themselves, or simply tear me apart and study me. Maybe I shouldn't have registered.

Dodging that and exposing them openly made for entertainment, I had to admit. It kept things interesting. And the status quo shifted away from the politicians who had persecuted mutants, even if they were now mutants themselves - being a baseline human became the novelty, rather than being a mutant, but by the time I left I made sure that everyone was a mutant of some sort.

I just wish I could see what mutants would look like after several generations of intermingling.