PROLOGUE: Chapter 01 - Two New Hopes?
> Xavier's School For Gifted Youngsters:
"There are very few mutants left..."
In an underground room of Xavier's Mansion.
Charles Xavier and Henry McCoy exchanged words as they closely analyzed a large screen showing the world map, highlighting with small dots the presence of surviving mutants in the post-M-Day world.
"Actually, I'm stunned every time I use Cerebro." Charles says, wearing his famous helmet, Cerebro, as he looks sadly at the small number of mutants who were active in the world since that day.
"For a moment... I forgot how to interact with this... I tried to 'SEE' something new." Charles says sadly.
"But you didn't see anything." Henry comments, letting out a deep sigh beside him.
"Exactly, Henry... Instead of finding new mutants to help, I'm just monitoring our current disheartening amount, which is constantly decreasing thanks to our enemies." Charles confesses, because since M-Day, no new mutant had appeared in the world... Except for a 'certain' new Summers.
"Cerebro has always had... That moment of doubt and expectation... The possibility of a new registration, of a new manifestation."
"But now... I'm starting to fear this room." Charles says sighing.
"Here they are. These are all the mutants that Cerebro can currently locate... There are only a few hundred..." Charles says looking at some small dots on the map.
Where there were once over 30 million, now there are only 198 active mutants in the world, although they knew of course that there could be other mutants who could stay off Cerebro's radar.
"You're not like that, Charles." Hank expresses, worried about Charles' mental health.
"We are... Slowly... Dying, Henry, and the next generation has been erased... As if they had never existed..." Charles says slowly, about to remove his helmet when suddenly:
"Aaahhhhhh!!!!" Charles lets out a huge cry of pain, while immediately on the screen two new small dots appeared, almost one above the other, located somewhere in Alaska.
A new mutant had been born.
After years, the curse was finally broken.
And it wasn't just one, but two new mutants.
"Aaahhhh!!!!" Charles continued screaming in pain as blood ran from his mouth, nose, and eyes. From the enormous psychic wave he was feeling directly in his brain.
This wasn't a normal psychic energy; it was clearly from an Omega-level mutant, and not just one, but two Omega-level mutants.
"Professor!!!" Hank yelled as he tried to remove the machine from Charles' head.
"AHHHH..." Charles fell slowly to the ground as his consciousness faded from the enormous shock of psychic energy he felt.
"Charles!!!" Hank yelled, managing to remove the device from Charles' head. He throws it away.
"Bummm."
Cerebro short-circuited, releasing a psychic blast that swept through the entire mansion. Windows shattered, objects fell, and the wave of energy reverberated through every corner of the mansion.
That small explosion of energy from Cerebro was felt and heard by almost everyone in the mansion. Especially by the telepaths.
In another part of the mansion. In a classroom.
Emma Frost was teaching what was left of the students, after the attacks by Reverend William Stryker's fanatics on the mansion, right after M-Day, where Stryker and his purifiers took advantage of the chaos that happened that day and attacked the students of the mansion mercilessly so that no more mutants would remain.
"Unhh" Emma lets out a small moan of pain as she feels some of the psychic energy released by the small explosion of the brain.
"Mrs. Frost? What's wrong?" Anole, one of the young mutants, asked with a very worried look.
For he and all the mutants there knew that whenever there was an attack, the telepaths were always the first to be attacked.
All the young people present were worried and some of the youngest even started to cry, already fearing the worst.
"Are we being attacked? Unbelievable!" Rockslide says sarcastically, as if being attacked was normal nowadays.
BACK TO THE CEREBRO ROOM.
"Charles...?" Hank says, worried about his friend who had just woken up.
"I'm fine... I'm just... Dizzy..." Charles says, waking up quickly from a faint, while wiping the blood from his nose with a tissue.
"What was that? The whole mansion's system short-circuited and just exploded..." Hank asks before being quickly interrupted.
"That, my friend...
...It may have been the rebirth of Hope." Charles says with a huge smile before taking one last look at the location of the new mutants who had just appeared.
"What...?" Hank asks incredulously.
"Henry, don't waste time, I want you to fix this quickly. We need the brain connected and working... As fast as possible... I'm going to activate the mansion's auxiliary power." Charles says, getting up and leaving the room, still with a smile on his face.
"...Then I'll be back soon to help them."
Charles says as he leaves the room, putting two fingers on his head.
"Scott, Emma, gather a field team and meet me in the hangar now." Charles orders, telepathically contacting the X-Men.
_____
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>>> HOURS LATER:
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Somewhere in Alaska, the Blackbird, the X-Men's iconic jet, flew at supersonic speed.
Aboard the Blackbird were the X-Men: Cyclops, Emma Frost, Nightcrawler, Wolverine, and Angel.
"Emma, we're approaching. Any telepathic readings?" Cyclops asked.
"No. Nothing… and that's worrying." Emma replied, unable to telepathically detect any presence in the nearby area.
"So that means...?" Nightcrawler began to express his concern before being interrupted.
"A city full of people and Emma can't hear any of their thoughts…" Wolverine said, already fearing that something terrible might have happened in that city.
"Maybe a trap?" Angel questioned.
Cyclops, piloting the Blackbird, tried to remain calm. "We don't have enough information yet, Warren."
The tension only increased as the Blackbird approached the city.
"He has a point, Summers, we know almost nothing about this place."
"And yet we're breaking the sound barrier to get here."
"Now Emma can't read any conscious thoughts… which means some device is blocking her… or there's no one down there."
"Either of those options sounds like a trap." Wolverine warned.
"There's a third option, Logan." Emma commented, suggesting the grim possibility that everyone in the city might be dead.
"No… We don't want to think about that yet." Cyclops interrupted, avoiding thinking about the worst.
"Mein Gott… {My God} Scott, I fear that…
We may have no choice." Kurt said, looking out the window at the city landscape below the Blackbird.
A landscape that looked like hell; the entire city was literally on fire.
"I can… Wait… I can hear them now… There are people down there, living people… Terrified." Emma said, grimacing as she telepathically sensed everyone down below.
"Looks like a goddamn war zone." Wolverine said, already preparing by putting on his mask.
"Logan, I want you and Kurt down there… Now." Cyclops said.
"Sure Thing Slim." Logan replied, putting his hand on Kurt's shoulder.
"Let's go, Elf." Wolverine said.
"BAMF." A small noise was heard, and Kurt and Wolverine quickly disappeared from the Blackbird.
Scott pressed a button on the jet's panel, and a door behind the Blackbird quickly opened.
"Warren, give me air cover! Find the survivors and keep an eye on whoever did this." Cyclops told Angel.
"Immediately." Angel replied, leaving the Blackbird and flying rapidly over the burning city.
"And what about us, Scott? No orders for me?" Emma Frost said, after closing the Blackbird's doors.
"You and I will find the truth here, Emma…
And pray that it's not what it seems…
That a mutant caused this." Cyclops said, looking at all the destruction and flames in the city, not wanting this to have been caused by the awakening of a mutant, as it wouldn't be good in the media.
Moments later, all the X-Men were already on the ground in that city.
"BAMF, BAMF." Small noises were heard in the city, noises caused by Kurt's teleportation, which every second he was using his power to take the injured to a safe place.
"Damn, this is awful." Scott said as he used his optic blast to remove some debris from his path.
"Calm down, maybe it's not what we're thinking." Emma said.
"What else can we think, Emma? We've been searching for the first new mutants since that damn day, and instead we find a disaster, and so far we have no clues about the two mutants." Cyclops said frustratedly to Emma.
"If our mutant did this, Scott, it must have been an accident. A reaction at the beginning of his mutation." Emma calmly replied, using her crystallized body to enter some houses without being injured by the fire.
"That's even worse, Emma, because if blowing up and setting the city on fire was the awakening of his mutations, then we should already be preparing for the damn reaction the media will have on us." Scott said angrily, already guessing the newspapers' reaction.
"I can already predict that these guys will say something like: look at the danger mutants can cause.... and blah blah." Scott said.
"Hate to interrupt, kids… But it wasn't an accident. It looks like it was a battle." Logan said, approaching and carrying the body of someone dead in his arms.
"And a mutant was responsible… It just wasn't what you're thinking." Logan said as he threw the dead mutant's body on the ground without any delicacy.
"Is this one of the Marauders?" Emma asked, approaching Logan and looking at the corpse of a large man on the ground.
"Yes… his name was Blockbuster. It looks like something pushed him, along with all these buildings, spreading hell everywhere." Logan replied.
"He wasn't alone, Logan, you need to see this." Nightcrawler said with a worried face after teleporting to their side.
Scott quickly went to Kurt and looked incredulously at two bodies on the ground, dressed in black robes with a huge white cross symbol in the middle of their robes.
"What… Those damn Purifiers? There were Purifiers here!?" Scott said with clenched fists.
"Yes… these two here… And four more around the city, all dead." Kurt replied as he teleported, bringing other bodies to that location.
"And this thing… What is this?… It seems to have been another Marauder. As far as I remember, they called him Prism. He wasn't a weak mutant; these Purifiers shouldn't have been able to destroy him like that." Emma Frost said, looking at a body completely split in half, the body seemed to be completely frozen or crystallized.
"This whole scene is still very recent… We lost this battle for at most an hour, probably close to half." Logan said, sniffing, still smelling the fresh scent of blood.
"So to summarize, we have… Sinister's assassins and an anti-mutant squad. Both got here faster than us… How the hell did that happen." Scott said, angry and frustrated with the situation.
"And obviously they knew something, or else they created a machine even more powerful than Cerebro." Logan replied.
After some more talk and discussion about what must have happened at the location, Logan, Kurt, and Scott decided to walk the streets of the city in search of additional clues.
Meanwhile, Emma Frost approached one of the surviving women.
Gently placing her fingers on the woman's head, Emma delved deep into her memories, seeking more crucial details to unravel the mystery before them.
Emma then witnessed in horror in the woman's memories, several Purifiers setting fire to defenseless children, whose anguished cries for help echoed through the city. Although some brave civilians tried to intervene, they were also brutally burned and killed by the relentless Purifiers.
After some time, the Purifiers had already killed half of the city's children and babies.
But suddenly Emma witnesses in the woman's memories the moment when the Marauders finally arrive, and immediately begin a war against the Purifiers. And at the same time behind a certain baby.
From then on, her memories ended, because the woman whose memories Emma was seeing fainted right after the Marauders arrived.
"Damn it." Emma shouted in frustration.
"Are you alright, Emma?" Scott asked.
"I'm fine, Scott, but this is worse than I thought." Emma replied.
"Logan was right, they really somehow knew that a mutant child would be born here today, but it's strange they only predicted one and not two as Cerebro picked up."
"The Purifiers were also just acting cautiously, they killed the children of this city just out of concern that none of them were the mutant they were looking for." Emma said angrily as she continued.
"Warren, where are you?" Emma contacted Angel telepathically.
"Where do you need me to be, Emma?" Angel quickly asked, flying over the city looking for some news.
"Go to the local hospital." Emma quickly said.
"I'm already on my way."
"When you get there, find the nursery."
"Okay."
Minutes later, Warren quickly arrived at the hospital, where he entered and began searching for the room where the babies were kept.
Seconds later, he quickly reached the nursery. Where practically everything was destroyed or… dead.
"They killed the babies… Those bastards killed the babies so they wouldn't become mutants." Warren said as he looked at all the completely destroyed cribs and completely dead, charred babies.
Kurt quickly also arrived at the scene, bringing with him through his teleportation the rest of the X-Men.
"Don't touch anything… I need to pick up the…
Logan quickly said and then began to use his sense of smell to try to smell the baby, but…
"Damn it." Logan said as he delivered a powerful punch to the wall.
"Nothing?" Scott asked worriedly.
"Nothing, damn it, there are too many chemicals in the air… I can't isolate the smell of anything." Logan replied irritated because his keen sense of smell had completely failed.
"There's no point in looking. The mutant babies aren't here. It's not any of these." Emma informed a few minutes later, arriving with some papers in hand.
"How do you know?" Scott asked, expressing doubts about Emma's findings.
"Birth records… Three babies were born here last night." Emma replied, showing Scott the documents, which contained detailed information about the babies.
"But there's only one newborn here." Emma said as she sadly looked at the nursery where a baby lay completely charred. Killed by the Purifiers.
"How sure are you that these are the two people picked up by Cerebro?" Logan asked Emma.
"Totally sure, because in the memories I saw, both groups were on their way to this hospital looking for a newborn baby, as three babies were born today and one of them is dead here, and the other two are not dead here either, so it's obvious that one of these two groups took the babies."
"According to the birth records one of them is a boy and the other is a girl." Emma said.
"I understand, this just means we have more work ahead of us… But we still don't know which of the two groups took the babies." Logan said before letting out a big sigh.
"Damn it." Scott.
While they talked, Emma continued reading some details like the parents' names, skin color, hair color, and other information about the babies.
"Oh my God, this…" Emma said as she looked with a scared face at the boy's birth registration paper.
"What now?" Angel asked beside Emma, approaching her along with the other X-Men to see what she had found that had scared her.
"Look at the name of this boy's father." Emma said, handing the papers to Angel.
"What, this guy… Wasn't he dead?" Angel also asked, scared after seeing the boy's father's name, and also imagining that that guy could still be alive.
"He was killed almost a year ago, so he could still have done this." Logan said, calming the group down a bit.
"He's dead, so there's no point in thinking about it anymore."
"Now at least we're sure that definitely the boy is a mutant since he's probably the son of this crazy guy…
MAD JIM JASPERS.
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Some time later, the X-Men gathered again inside the Blackbird.
"We should have taken the Marauders' bodies with us."
"They're going to blame the mutants for this… Not the Purifiers." Logan manifested, already worried about the possible repercussions from the government, with whom the mutants had always had a terrible relationship.
"The survivors will remember that we put them to safety." Scott calmly replied.
"Well… We have big problems anyway," Logan stated again.
"Yes… The first mutants born in years… Two mutants so powerful that they took down Cerebro just by being born…
It's most likely that both are currently in Sinister's hands."
"I have a feeling that the government will be the least of our worries." Scott commented as he piloted the Blackbird, which quickly flew away from the city, returning to the mansion.
…....