Lucius stood in his lab beside one more devout semi-believer who was still discovering, with touching sincerity, that his prayers had not been ignored so much as redirected.
The man was strapped upright into a reinforced wooden chair with his head held steady by leather braces Lucius had designed after the fourth trial had an episode with a shameless, cocky and out-of-line test subject trying to control the metal in the lab to escape, which resulted in his own face turning inside out.
He had also stopped calling them subjects in his own head at some point. Subjects implied distance. Believers was much more accurate.
A ring of instruments hovered around the man's head and shoulders.
Scalpels, clamps, a narrow drill, two probes, and a polished steel rod, no sane doctor would have used for anything gentle, all hung in the air with perfect stillness. Lucius did not touch them with telekinesis. That was the point. The tools floated because he willed the metal itself to move, bend, stop, pivot, and wait. A different feel from telekinesis entirely.
He rather liked it.
The semi-believer noticed the same thing and, in fairness, had every right to look frightened by it.
Lucius angled his head and watched a fine steel needle rotate slowly in front of the man's eye.
"See?" he said in a tone some priests might have envied. "Progress. You should be proud to have helped. Not many people get to contribute this directly to excellence."
The man tried to answer through the gag. Lucius could have read the thought if he cared. He did not. Most of their thoughts at this stage were repetitive and unhelpful.
He had already gifted magnetic control to over fifteen men and women with usable success. That was the official count. The unofficial count included the happy little accidents, and they had been instructive in all the ways that mattered.
The first attempts had been messy.
Human beings, Lucius had discovered, contained just enough iron in the blood to turn a bad transfer into a grotesque internal mutiny. A nudge too strong, a field patterned too early, or a body too weak to handle the change, and the iron answered before the nervous system knew which side of itself to defend. Hearts seized. Blood vessels tore. Bodies lost their argument with circulation. Biological functions terminated with admirable speed and disappointing utility.
Truly saddening.
Still, he learned quickly.
That was what mattered. He always did.
By the sixth useful success, he had stabilised the transfer method. By the tenth, he had refined the field control. By the fifteenth, he had something worth stealing from those temporary owners and adding to himself properly.
He smiled as the floating tools began moving again.
One probe lowered to the believer's temple. A second touched the throat. The steel rod rotated twice, then snapped into place across the chest, where the transfer lattice would need alignment.
Everything was behaving.
He had experience with this sort of accumulation now. Similar talents, taken in sequence, did not simply stack. They deepen and get enhanced. Thickened into something closer to a dominant principle. The best proof of that remained Jean Grey.
Or rather, the three Jean Greys Mr Sinister had so generously failed to keep.
Lucius still found that memory deeply satisfying.
Most men would have called stealing three clones of one of the most powerful telepaths on the planet reckless. Lucius called it corrective redistribution. Sinister had been hoarding. Lucius had fixed the problem. After all, if a man lacked the manners to secure his cloned assets properly, then Providence was merely inviting a better class of thief to participate.
He had sacrificed all three, and the result had been glorious.
His telepathy and telekinesis had not reached Phoenix-level Jean Grey, because cosmic bird nonsense still cheated at a scale even he had the courtesy to acknowledge, but beneath that absurd threshold, he stood only second to her. More importantly, he had earned it through initiative, intelligence, and the very Christian virtue of not letting good merchandise go to waste.
That, in his view, made him morally superior to nearly everyone involved.
So when he took magnetic control from fifteen separate sources, one after the next, he knew the outcome would not be a mere copy of Erik's gift.
It would be better.
Not merely stronger in brute effect, though it was that too. Broader in scale, denser in potency. Like an instinct, but more deliberately structured. Erik had been born with a masterpiece and shaped it through war, fury, and practice. Lucius had harvested pieces of a masterpiece, multiplied the principle, refined the transfer, and then installed the total like a civilised lunatic.
The result sat in him now with absolute grace.
Potent enough, he suspected, to give Magneto, enhanced by En Sabah Nur, a run for his money.
He would have enjoyed that.
The believer in the chair whimpered when the first layer of induced field pressure began to spread through his bloodstream.
Lucius watched the reaction closely.
"Easy," he murmured. "You are not dying yet. That would make this trial statistically unhelpful."
The tools turned in small coordinated arcs around the man's body. A clamp pressed to the sternum. The needle entered just below the collarbone. The field lattice formed under Lucius's control, invisible but not untraceable. He could feel it threading through the iron in the blood, the charge beginning to answer, the body trying to understand why a power it had never owned was now pushing at its deeper structure.
He started to organise the man's thoughts, giving him the knowledge of how to control the gift before taking it back.
No vessel rupture.
No myocardial revolt.
No catastrophic nervous interference.
He drew the probe away, let the field settle, and then lifted a steel instrument tray off the table with a thought.
Then Lucius let the tray hover in front of the man's face and rotated it once.
"Try it." He ordered and smiled after the man took control of it. With his stronger control, he took over the control from the man and smiled.
"Congratulations," he said. "You are still alive. We do celebrate milestones here."
The man cried harder. He has already witnessed the so-called celebrations while his body started to float towards a circle with strange symbols.
Lucius sighed softly.
People were so rarely appreciative of hard work.
He stepped back, studied the transfer results one more time, and then turned to the soldier waiting by the far wall before sacrificing his last success.
"Bring me ten more."
The soldier saluted first, as years of military conditioning and Lucius's telepathic gardening had blended into something obedient.
Then he left.
Lucius watched him go and let his mind drift towards the next acquisition on his list while the sacrifice was being carted off to wherever the SMS entity kept its accounting.
Pyro or the Zippo man.
He still found the man's mutation faintly insulting in its incompleteness. All that flair, attitude, that adolescent pyromaniac theatre, and the bastard still could not generate fire on his own. He needed the existing flame the way a badly raised rich boy needed inherited money. Control without production. Style without source. A lighter with opinions.
Still, once improved properly, the talent could be useful.
Lucius intended to take it in a higher package than the original owner had ever had or deserved.
He floated towards the central worktable while his thoughts wandered somewhere else entirely.
Jamie Madrox.
Now there was a problem.
The mutation itself was attractive in theory. Kinetic duplication meant every strike, shove, or impact could throw off another full copy, which made it useful, expandable, and potentially obscene in the correct direction.
In practice, however, Lucius had serious concerns.
He was fairly sure he could not tolerate a clone with his own mindset. One Lucius was already a large enough administrative burden on the moral health of humanity. Two would be vulgar. Five would be an offence against civilisation.
Unless he found a more controlled method, he was not taking that risk. He refused to spawn clones with the snap of a finger, like some discount stage magician with a personality disorder.
Then the more practical concern arrived.
What, exactly, was supposed to happen when he had time to enjoy a lovely woman? Would he throw off a clone with every decent slap of their thighs? Would the room suddenly gain an extra Lucius halfway through the pleasant part and expect him to act as if that were normal?
Absolutely not.
He was pretty sure he would not trust his perfect arse to someone like him. The man would be selfish, opportunistic, overconfident, and entirely too capable of justifying whatever outrage he attempted. Which, granted, only proved the clone would be accurate, but accuracy was not always a virtue, not unless it was his accuracy.
And then there was the social issue.
Lucius liked his sexual encounters properly arranged. He did not want them degenerating into sausage parties because a mutation had poor timing and worse manners.
No.
Madrox's gift would be refrigerated for now.
A splendid mutation, yes, but not one to swallow until he found a way to dominate the clones permanently.
The lab door opened before he could continue the thought in any direction that might become medically questionable.
Ten men shuffled in under guard.
They were not impressive. That, in a way, was why they were here.
Low-level street rot. Drunkards, thieves, small-time predators, two junkies, one man who looked as though a lifetime of excuses had been stored directly in the face, another who had apparently attempted to complain to the facility manager about rough treatment and shouting about racial discrimination before learning that no such office existed in any meaningful sense.
Most of them already wore bruises or blackened patches from what the soldiers had apparently described as a gentle explanation. One had dried blood at the corner of the mouth. Another favoured his ribs. The fear in all of them, however, was fresh and clean.
Lucius opened his arms in welcome.
"Come, my children," he said with a bright, friendly smile and a manic gleam in his eyes.
The ten men stopped as one.
They looked at the hovering metal instruments. At the blood stains covering the chair, the floor, the walls, and part of the ceiling.
At the floor markings. At Lucius himself, too tall, too calm, too pleased, standing there as though the whole scene were the start of a respectable evening's hobby.
One of the bums swallowed hard enough to make the sound audible.
Lucius's smile widened.
Yes.
This would do nicely.