Earth 534834
8th February 1992
02:34 GMT +3
"You know… Ororo, I've been meaning to bring this up for a while."
Ororo's keeping an eye on the floodlight-lit playing field below us where the remains of the Genosha 'Self-Defence Force' are kneeling with their hands behind their backs. We're both more than a little concerned that the resistance fighters and mutant civilians policing our temporary holding area might take the opportunity to just kill them all. Not quite sure what we're going to do with them.
They're the locals, after all.
"You are free to speak."
"Team balance. I realise that Charles took whatever mutants he could get when he started the X-Men, and that it was mostly to train them in using their abilities safely and usefully rather than crafting the best possible field team, but… It seems to me that we've got quite a lot of D-. People who can shoot things or smash them, but not a lot of people who can absorb damage or heal."
"I do not know of any mutants who have powers that allow them to heal others."
I frown. "Huh. Really?"
"If such powers were commonplace, mutants would be more widely accepted. People fear fighters more than physicians."
I nod. "So there
aren't any, or we just haven't heard of them?"
"Mutant powers emerge without rhyme or reason. Though there is no reason to believe that healing powers cannot exist, if there
were mutants with the power to heal, we would have no easy way to hear of them."
"Well, I'm going to count that as evidence in my favour." She gives me a dubious look. "Oh, come on, what's more evolutionarily useful: the ability for a member of a species that already has guns to fire low-grade explosives from their hands, or the ability to heal rapidly?"
"Evolution is seldom so simple. And the absence of an obvious precursor ability does not 'prove' the involvement of alien biologists."
I grin. "So are you taking the bet? It's just you and Henry who are holding out."
She'd clearly like to be able to say 'yes', but she
masters herself. "No, though I will be happy to review any evidence you find. Should you actually
find any."
"And I'll be happy to present it to you. How about tanks?"
"Tanks?"
"People who can take hits. A taser doesn't do much to me, but they hit Anne-Marie hard enough to stun her."
Of course, I only had to hold them off for the few moments it took her to activate the Impact Beam Ring, and then we were
both immune to just about every weapon they had. The robots and power armour slowed us down a
little, but Anne-Marie and I both have far more resilience than they could cope with. Well, when her ring's active in her case. It took a
lot of electricity to down her, but she's actually quite a lot less tough than she is strong, something I hadn't really… Picked up on before.
"There are several such people in Cerebro's database, but most of them have made choices that would make joining the X-Men difficult."
Henry is a bit tougher than a normal human, but not by all that much and he's in gaol at the moment in any case. Logan heals faster, but he's not actually all that much harder to hurt than a normal human. And he made it very clear when I asked that while he's more
used to being hurt than most people, it still hurts him just as much as anyone else. Apparently he gave up wearing body armour because it wasn't effective enough to make up for the pain of pulling partially-melted steel plates off his skin. Which is pretty fair.
"The easiest thing would be for people to find
us, but that draws attention to the school, which… Has its own problems."
She nods solemnly.
"…mutant citizens of Genosha will not tolerate…"
I wince as a man I recognise as
the leader of a resistance group called '
The Acolytes' starts grandstanding for the benefit of the other mutant tourists. Apparently, the Acolytes are big fans of Magneto, which is a little odd because as far as I know he's never met them and he's always on the lookout for new mutant henchmen. Not sure how much of that attachment is a reaction to the radical anti-mutant practices of the Genosha government, being drawn to his mutant-supremacist teaching as a result. Or I suppose they could be natural mutant-supremacists. As Sir Terry Pratchett wrote, 'Just because someone's a member of an ethnic minority, it doesn't mean that they're not a nasty, small-minded little jerk.'
I turn to Ororo. "Do you want to get that, or shall I?"
"I think that it may do him some good to interact with humans-"
There's a
tiny hesitation which lasts
nearly long enough to make me raise my eyebrows.
"-who are not mutants."
I smile and nod in gratitude, because it took a
while for the X-Men to understand the point I was making there, and her acceptance of my terminology is a minor victory for both science and integration.
I give her a jaunty salute and then
fly over to where Mr. Cortez is holding court. Surprising that a man of his mindset hasn't picked a 'mutant name', but I haven't had enough exposure to the mutant subculture to really be sure what that signifies.
A
couple of his
friends spot me as I get closer, but he himself doesn't react to me until I
drop into his line of sight.
"Mister Cortez?" I smile warmly. "Is there a problem?"
"Not any
longer." He looks.. genuinely pleased to see me, though living out in the Genoshan wilds hasn't exactly lent itself to regular washing. "Now we are free of our oppressors!"
The Genoshan government database says that he's Spanish, so I'm not all that sure how they were oppressing him from
here. I don't want to… Imply anything, but for an island off the coast of Africa the Acolytes…
I'd be surprised if they were
local, let's put it like that.
"Do any of you-"
He's turned back to the crowd. "We will establish Genosha as a home for all mutantkind!"
"-have any government experience, because-"
"Free from all who would enslave us!"
"-running a country is actually quite hard-."
"Free from all
humans who hate and fear their us as their
superiors!"
"Mister Cortez,
I'm human."
That brings him up short. He turns on the spot. "What?"
I hold up
my left hand, showing my glowing ring. "No x-gene, I'm afraid. Just an alien ring." I shrug. "I just really don't like slavery, and my.. girlfriend
does have an x-gene. So if you could tone down the racism a bit, that would be splendid. Also, if you keep trying to incite a crowd to murder our prisoners, I'm not going to be very impressed. Look." I move my eyes from him to the now slightly less riled up crowd of holidaying mutants. "You've all had a very hard time. Why don't you head over to the hotels and get some rest in an actual bed. Then we can all get together and decide what to do with this lot tom-. Later today, when we're all thinking a bit more clearly?"
Mr. Cortez grimaces, then marches off, his Acolytes following behind him. One of them, a
red haired woman, glances back for a moment before writing me off. With
them gone, the rest of the crowd decide to-.
Somewhere near the back of the crowd I spot a hulking great man I recognise as
the time traveller Cable. We make momentary eye contact and then he's gone, vanishing into the darkness. I
could go after him, but… That sounds like a bad idea.
Alright, demagogue sent away, crowd dispersed, prisoners not going anywhere. Now all that's left-.
"So sugah." Anne-Marie drifts down to stand beside me. She's thrown a blouse and sarong on, but those really do more to emphasise the thing they're concealing than to actually conceal it. "What was that about a ring?"
the distant future of 2011!) And does he use that as an excuse occasionally when he uses slang or pop-culture references they don't know?
