The concept of TCP – Tales of Common People – belongs to Kelly "Kielle" Newcomb and Phil Foster. TCP stories deal with ordinary, non superhero mutants living in the Marvel Universe. The concept practically died together with the death of its founding mother, Kielle but I decided to take an attempt to resurrect it. It's much more interesting to write about ordinary mutants not belonging to any of the X-Men teams and leading normal life.

If there's any thing I can say I own about the world my characters live in, it's they and nothing else. Those stories came into being thanks to the cooperation taking place between myself and my beta Moviemom44 – I wrote them while her task was doing the beta work.

This series was inspired by the unfinished "198 Could Have Beens" one by Vine you can find in here. Another important factor that contributed to its being posted here was the thread of mine on the Marvel board which raised the issue of hypothetical mutants who might never discover their powers due to an unfortunate coincidence which made them unable to find their mutant powers.

Silei Toleafoa always wanted to be a mutant. Or at least to establish a connection with one.

Being a direct descendant of the Rapa Nui people, this young woman spent her whole life--27 years--in Hanga Roa, Easter Island. Her life there where she worked as an elementary school teacher didn't exactly abound with exciting adventures, that was for sure. Bored with her monotonous life, Silei devoted the majority of her spare time to reading about mutants. It was one of her favorite free time activities since childhood when the first shy flame of desire to be something more than an ordinary person, more than all the ordinary people she knew, flared to life in her heart. And this desire only grew stronger with each passing year.

The problem was that she wasn't any different than the ordinary islanders whose mundane way of life she hated so much and she was painfully aware of it. As much as she desired the company of others--humans or mutant, who, she KNEW this, must live somewhere on the island--she was too socially withdrawn to find it. Her social inadequacy frustrated her even more than the sad awareness that for all her life she had never been a mutant, nor had she ever met one. Well, she might have, but she wasn't one hundred percent sure. There must have been many mutants even here, on this island forgotten by God and people. She just never met anyone who she could know for sure was a mutant. This thought became her obsession. If she herself wasn't born with the X-gene--she easily came to accept this; the probability of this was small as it was--then at least she should be given a chance to know such people. Why was she denied this?

If Miss Toleafoa lived in a big city with easy access to mental health care, her depressive tendencies and melancholic disposition would be diagnosed as severe permanent dysthymia. Her case would also be recognized as the condition known as 'compensatory narcissism'. In other words, the young teacher from Rapa Nui island desperately wanted to be someone special with a capital 'S', or at least get to know such people, but she completely lacked the skills to achieve this and would have been greeted the notion with an embarrassed smile if anyone ever managed to read her thoughts. Unless, of course, that person was a mutant telepath. There had to be such people here, she knew this, if not in Hanga Roa itself, then maybe in the other parts of the island.

When Miss Silei Toleafoa wasn't reading about mutants on the Internet, in her free time, she took the car and set out on trips around Rapa Nui. On the subconscious level, she knew these attempts were futile--she couldn't expect an X-gene carrier to jump out, out of the blue, right in front of her car, shouting, "I'm the one you were looking for your whole life. I want to be your friend forever and ever."--but she couldn't stop herself from trying again and again, no matter how disappointed she always was when she came back from one of those trips.

And it was the reason why Silei more and more often parked her car on the beaches of the island, with the moai as her sole companions, trying to stare through the space separating Rapa Nui from the closest inhabited island, a place she had neither the money nor the courage to move to. Even those small islands--the Pitcairn Islands--were more than two thousand kilometers away. She'd never get there, let alone to the more distant lands, far, far away, where the X-Men lived. Each time she came to the beach, Silei went into the warm water of the Pacific Ocean. Each time, she went a bit farther. While she was in the water, she would stand for some time, her eyes fixed on the space, still, like she was one of the stone statues the island was so famous for. Then, with a soft sigh, she would come out of the water and go home. Each time she went out farther and farther. And each time she came out tears glistened on her face. One day, Silei went out farther than usual. Hours later, only her car was found. There was no body. Only the moai, silent sentries of the secrets of the island, if they were capable of speaking, could have answered the question of what happened to the woman who wanted to know mutants. Because the members of that particular minority were here, always, in hiding. They had to be. She just never met one.

A couple of months after Silei's last trip to the beach, a group of American scientists appeared on the island, secretly trying to do research on potential mutants who might live there. Among them was a woman with an unusual mutant gift. She could track others of her kind down all over the world, regardless of whether they were still alive or had lived in the past. This mutant was using a device that magnified her abilities. She closed her eyes and concentrated, trying to locate any possible Rapa Nui representatives of homo superior. The machine, which she controlled with the power of her thoughts, started to make silent vibrations and then began printing the results of the mental scanning. The woman spent the next fifteen minutes unmoving before she opened her eyes, took out the printed sheet of paper and showed it to her colleagues:

Mutant scanning in progress.

Mutant found in the area: 1

Name: Silei Toleafoa

Location: Hanga Roa, Easter Island

Status: Deceased

Power: The strong ability to detect mutants within twenty-five kilometers of her location.