Disclaimer: Marvel characters belong to Marvel, not to me.

Author's Note: this is meant to occur 'in the near future', in a melting-pot X-Men universe that mixes a bit of the movies, older comics and animated series.

It starts as a routine morning in a European suburb that shall remain anonymous, for obvious reasons. Getting ready, getting the kids ready, kissing the husband good day, getting the kids to school. The point where things get different is when I head to our backyard for the journey to work.

'Journey' might seem like a strong word, considering that the commute is actually thirty minutes, tops, which is pretty good by the standards of this city. And that I don't have to worry about traffic or broken trains, which makes the whole thing kind of cool, like those top executives who use helicopters. That's the benefit of riding in a giant steel ball to work. The downsides are a) the jokes, and b) no windows.

The really impressive part is that the bloody thing is somehow supersonic, so half an hour is all it takes me to reach the unfortunate Latin American country that has the dubious privilege of hosting Magneto's current base.

Once the ball has docked in its hangar, I head first for coffee - at least it's good here - and check the system logs. Plumber is a bit of a misnomer for what I do, though it includes that too. And, in an outfit that has Toad and Sabertooth as regular members, taking care of the plumbing offers some unique challenges.

Before I came into the picture, Toad was the closest thing Magneto had to a handyman, and he is the guy who once wired every apparatus entrusted to him with the brown wire to the ground because he thought it was the right color. (For reference, it's the striped green and yellow wire that goes to ground. They made it that way so no one could possibly mix it up.) Since Magneto has little patience for such notions as a staged power-up, or field-testing, what should have been a spectacular launch ended up as a spectacular explosion.

Now, Magneto has discovered how handy it could be to have someone who could turn a scribbled diagram into a working psychic shield without shorting half the inventory along the way, and he hasn't let me go. Not that I would want that either, as I'm rather afraid his notion of 'employee termination' would be putting emphasis on the word 'termination'.

Today, I find an order to check the wiring and power on the transmitter array. It's the giant satellite dish that sits right on top of the base (to forestall any question, no, Magneto is not worried about the local military). That means Magneto will likely want to do a worldwide transmission in the near future. Of course, in this day and age, he doesn't need to hijack TV transmissions to reach a worldwide audience. I think he does it just for the principle of the thing - he isn't the kind of guy to rely on anything 'social' or 'viral'.

Usually, I wouldn't worry too much about whatever Magneto is cooking up. A worldwide address in the morning would mean an afternoon forecast of 'rain, with a strong probability of X-Men', and making it off work early because the base has been trashed. But between the rumbles about authorizing mutant-hunting robots in the States (Sentinels - sounds better than 'giant murderous robots', right?), and the new guys that have joined Magneto recently, I'm afraid the ragtag team of mutant superheroes might be outclassed this time.

As I start rappelling down the back of the antenna - because someone is too busy to put it back into parking position-, I spot a figure sticking at a right angle to one of the support beams.

'Hey, Toad.'

'Yo, Plumbie.'

As I lower myself closer to his perch, I see that the usual greenish tinge of his skin has turned a much darker shade in several places, and he is nursing his right arm.

'You're up early,' I comment. It is, after all, 8 a.m. local time.

'Got woken up by some Acolytes,' he grumbles. 'They wanted to get me into their morning meeting.'

'Eh. For this, I'm glad I'm human. I don't think I will be invited to one of those anytime soon.'

'What a bunch of dorks,' he snorts. 'Eating up the shit that guy Cortez is serving to them. It's like he wants them to worship the boss or something.'

'He sure tries to get that Messiah vibe going. But he doesn't really cut it as a prophet. Hey, he chose the name of a conquistador as his 'mutant name'. It's kind of giving away the game.'

'Well, me, I'm not buying it. I joined with Magneto so I could kick some human ass, live the good life. Not to listen to that psycho.'

My eyes follow the direction of Toad's look, down to the base below us. When we first moved the base here, Mastermind took one look at Cortez and these 'Acolytes', and then he was gone, literally in one blink. Well, he disappeared from our eyes in one blink - he likely took time to pick up his stuff, just without anyone being able to see him. His illusions are powerful enough that Magneto is the only one who can track him down, and he only ever bothers if he needs him for his current scheme.

'If I don't hear the phrase 'our lord Magneto' ever again, it will be too soon,' I mumble.

Toad's thoughts must have run along similar tracks, because his next words echo mine, in his own way:

'Screw this shit. I'm outta here.'

The next instant he is bouncing off, down the antenna and into the forest below. And I'm more conflicted about him leaving than I would ever have expected before we came here. Mastermind slipping out didn't mean much - Toad, on the other hand, that's a really bad sign. It comes on top of Sabertooth 'taking time off to get in touch with his mutation' (in Magneto's words - translated: he has gone completely feral again). With Mystique sent out on an infiltration mission ever since the first Sentinel appeared, that leaves only Cortez and his own people in the base with Magneto. And me.

I quickly replace the broken relay I was tracking down, and get back to ground level. Right at the entrance is the aforementioned Cortez, conversing with the two flunkies on guard duty. It's unusual enough for him to bother with such trivialities that I start wondering. Was he watching me?

As I brush past them without a word, I can feel his look on me. I should be past the point where being in close quarters with a bunch of mutant supremacists is anything but another day on the job, yet he still manages to unnerve me. To help you understand why, let me give you a comparison. When you're human and you're unlucky enough to meet Magneto face-to-face, he has this look that tells you he could kill you on the spot, and he would not loose a wink of sleep. Cortez, though? Cortez looks like he could kill you on the spot, and he would enjoy it.

'Magneto's human,' he sneers in my back. 'Don't worry, your usefulness is not going to last much longer.'

I'm spared from trying to reply to that when I get a ping on my mPhone. Now, the mPhone is simply a heavily modded smartphone, guaranteed not to send its data to anyone but Magneto. The choice for its name was, as ever, unfortunately predictable. That particular ping signals a message from Magneto himself, and its perfect timing probably owes to the base's surveillance system. It simply reads 'Come to the main lab now. M.' I turn around and show it to Cortez.

'Still more useful than you, apparently,' I can't resist commenting. It won't faze him, but my target audience is actually the rest of the Acolytes. I prefer to reinforce regularly the notion that Magneto would be... annoyed if anything unexpected happened to me.

'Keep believing that... Plumber.'

Apparently, Cortez can't resist a parting shot, even an uninspired one.

Making my way down, unhindered for now, I can't help but retracing how we - I - landed in that particular mess. Besides fawning adoration, amplified powers (that's Cortez' mutant power), and a country where they have practically free reign, Cortez and his Acolytes offered something else to Magneto: a chance to get his hands on a Sentinel prototype. The local government was so terrorized by their attacks, that they accepted the offer from Trask Corp to become the testing ground for their Sentinel program.

As the skewered Sentinel currently lying in Magneto's lab can attest, there is still room for improvement.

Now, I don't mean to criticize too harshly. I've seen the thing, and I can tell a lot of effort went into it. The overall craftsmanship is excellent, and a lot of attention was paid to the details: very little metal for Magneto to work with, top-quality components from the repulsors in the feet to the optical sensors in the 'eyes', a well-protected central processing unit, and a communication array that packs quite a punch.

The computing core was, if anything, too well protected, because Magneto got it intact. He has spent the past two days deciphering every software component, since he was not satisfied by his examination of the hardware. Of course, he is looking for a way - any way - to take control of the robots for his own use, or at least flip their programming, so that they attack humans instead of mutants. So when I get to the main lab, I already know nothing good can come out of this whole situation.

As I enter, Magneto abandons the pattern-recognition algorithms he was sifting through, and turns back to the Sentinel lying there. He picks up a small unit from a tray, with a rather sharp-looking protuberance - made of some sort of ceramic, of course - bonded to a circuit board.

'This,' he starts, adopting his teacher tone, 'is the heart of the Sentinel: the mutant detector unit. Unfortunately, its workings still elude me, and Mystique has been unable to procure its schematics. So,' he adds through clenched teeth, 'it appears that I need your help to figure it out.'

Great. I need to nip that kind of thinking right in the bud.

'No, you don't,' I answer firmly. 'You have built stuff ten times bigger and more complicated than a killer robot - on your own. I had to practically rewrite Maxwell's equations to account for the unnatural things you do to the laws of electromagnetism. You can look at a motherboard and tell what is running on the computer. So, if you can't figure out how this thing works, I'm certainly not the one...' I am about to finish '... who is going to', but then I do figure it.

And then I got a problem, because I really should keep that 'I got it' expression out of my face, but I'm not good at poker faces. And then the whole world has a problem, because Magneto also has his 'I got it' face, and he is smirking.

'Thank you for your help, my dear. I could not have figured it without you.'

Christ, what an asshole.