Jump 337: X-Men Movies

Jump #337: X-Men Movies
>The Empress, reversed: Unhappiness, selfishness, poverty and disruption of the home or family.
Sounds like what I'm coming into, honestly. Let's fix it.
>Age: 19
>Location: New York City
>Identity: Drop-In
>Drawbacks: (+600) A Blast From The Past: Future Past; Making Waves; Mysterious Past; I'm The Juggernaut, Bitch!
What a delight. I'm in 1973, and magic is real. I know this because the Juggernaut is definitely not a mutant and is currently behind me putting holes in buildings. I'm wanted in a European country with an extradition treaty with the US, and I'm on the radar of other organizations that would happily black-bag me.
>Scenario: (+200) One In The Same
>Do I Owe You Money? (Free, Drop-In)
Being able to get out of certain obligations is a plus.
>Don't You Know Who I Am? (1600, Drop-In)
This one can wait until I get the bonus for completing the scenario, as it's a massive, massive reputation booster.
>Super Vision (Delta) [Free: 200/400 power bonus]
Another step in the Kryptonian Lite package! Now I can see the world the way he does, at least in theory. This will probably help me when I'm working on science projects, too.
>Wall-Crawling (Delta) [Free: 400/400 power bonus]
So even when walking at any given speed, I can still walk on walls. It sounds awfully useful, even if hiding on the ceiling isn't remotely as effective as movies might claim.
>Super Speed (Omega) (800)
With this, I shall achieve maximum fast, combining with Fastest Thing Alive. Peak speed of mach 55 between the two of them, assuming I'm not using other perks to break through the caps. Which I am.
>Technopathy (Omega) (0)
I was honestly going to go with omega-level healing factor, but instead I went for technopathy. I can already basically heal whatever, up to and including the complete disintegration of my body, after all.

So I've got twenty years to make mutants accepted. But I would have had thirty to make mutants rule everything. That's a little bit unfair, but that's okay, I can still make this work out. It's easy to do if you are charismatic enough, have some knowledge of the setting, and the ability to sway public opinion. And the ability to deal with the various threats in the setting.

I have a company, slightly smaller than Stark Industries, that I can have shoehorned into the setting. Crux International, Inc. is a reasonable company and I have absolutely no problem with populating the company with LMDs to get things done in a reasonable time span, nor hacking government databases to give them identities. Or bribing someone. But anyway, this means I am able to accelerate the advancement of local technology and invest in other companies. 1973 means I'm on the ground floor for computers, among a great many other developments. Like metallurgy. Like space exploration.

Having LMDs everywhere means I can use them to infiltrate other industries too. Newspapers. Television. Politics. Always constantly working to shape public opinion and drown out the voice of idiots. In addition to that, there's always the Illuminati, which I will happily bring into existence to aim for the best common good for the world.

This is why I am glad I have cloning perks. I can multitask, do a great many things, and be in many places at once. Especially when I identify certain players who would be instrumental in making the world a worse place, and are already actively working toward it. It's easy to make their deaths look like natural causes, if they are unwilling to change their ways.

And I can tie up the courts while trying to prove myself innocent my supposed crimes, while I use another identity to run the company. Yay clones.

Other things that I will be doing while my clone-selves are busy setting the stage: meeting with Logan-who-was-sent-to-the-past, telling him to let the future folk know that his time travel attracted attention from Something From Outside (in an appropriate place, with the sweet evil reverb going, mirrors and shadows each showing a different one of my forms) and that I've seen how the world ends, his changes make it end with a whimper instead of a bang (and spoil the plot of Logan-the-film), and would he perhaps like a hand changing it?

I try not to get in the way of things overly much, at first, but... well. A bit of surveillance on Logan and a bit of precog reveals that they are about to take some questionable actions. The alarms in Magneto's prison fail and everyone walks right out the front door. Sorry to steal your thunder, Quicksilver. Meanwhile, in Saigan, William Stryker steps on a land mine and ends up a charred lump of hamburger, quite a bit to Mystique's surprise as she was about to stop him from speaking to some mutant GIs.

Either way, the showdown in Paris happens - the public becomes aware of mutants as a result. The news spins that in an interesting way - with a small bit of nudging, CBS evening news points out that if mutants are real, then they've probably kept themselves hidden for good reason, but perhaps if they know they aren't the only ones... they won't feel that they need to be.

The Sentinel program is unveiled at the White House and is an unmitigated disaster. Rather than taking control of them, Magneto has to throw in with the others to defend everyone against them - they've gone berserk, attacking officials. Kissinger is among the few casualties, but it is particularly notable that Magneto is among the mutants defending the bystanders, and even stops them from killing the president.

When the dust settles, it turns out that Trask wasn't waiting for approval for the Sentinel program, but planned to use them to execute a military coup with the mutant threat serving as a convenient excuse, or at least that's what the paper trail says despite him claiming otherwise. He's thrown into solitary and is found to have hung himself not long after. Such a pity. Sometime in the future, Wolverine wakes up, extremely confused about the whole thing.

And so it goes, except with positive news about mutants. A government agency is formed, not unlike the job corps, and within a few years there are plenty of mutants working for the government and putting their talents to work in a unique capacity, after navigating bureaucracy of course, but you'd be surprised how much this helps their public image. Especially with a handful of LMDs in there, using technologically-simulated powers running off an internal arc reactor. Meanwhile, Xavier's academy is booming, is fully accredited, and helping mutants get an education while learning to control their powers. And getting government money to that end.

In the intervening years, I keep a monitoring charm on Magneto. When I find that he's been taken into the woods by a number of police with crossbows, I obliviate them. All of them. And then relocate him, his daughter who has the power to control birds, and his wife who apparently had a latent healing factor that wasn't triggered until she'd been accidentally shot in the kidney with a crossbow bolt.

When En Nabah Sur is unearthed, things go largely as expected - I had lost track of the time, and I was busy investing a lot of energy into clean nuclear power and NASA's space program. (Side note: The US landed on Mars in 1993, and the first person to step foot on Mars was a mutant with a healing factor, as it later was discovered. The Soviet Union imploding at the same time is certainly just a coincidence...)

And then the mansion is blown up because Havok is an idiot. Quicksilver did a wonderful job of saving everyone except for him, though when the mansion is dug out later, it turns out that he somehow survived because we aren't playing the Marvel are-they-dead-are-they-alive games and ended up in a coma for a few months.

When everyone goes to Egypt to deal with Apocalypse, it's not just the X-Men who are there, it's also the Mutant Corp. As an all-hands-on-deck situation, everyone banded together. Everyone charged in. Instead of Apocalypse's four horsemen dealing with a dozen mutants, they end up dealing with a hundred, including Magneto. And myself. Though it was rather worrying when one of his horsemen ended up being the goddamn Juggernaut. Regardless, the day was saved, the Juggernaut was kicked onto the moon, and all was well aside from Xavier's new need for a hairpiece.

Notable: up to that point the Juggernaut kept coming across myself and my clone around the world, and had a habit of destroying any Crux International buildings, property, and attacking our people. To the point that I had some of my pseudo-mutant LMDs recruited into a private security firm for purposes of driving him off or delaying him until I could lead him away.

Also, any number of news agencies in Cairo got footage. As did the CIA. And a lot of that footage found its way onto the news.

The next day's newspaper headlines: Mutants Save The World.

It's hard to push back against that, no?

Years later, on the day that a girl named Anne Marie would accidentally put her boyfriend in a coma and then run away from home, she finds a Life Model Decoy stop her and direct her toward Xavier's school, with a letter and a small vial that should, at the very least, help give her control of her powers. Because Beast was onto something with his stabilization serum, he just needed a little extra help and mad science.