Disclaimer: I own nothing in the X-men evolution universe, nor the Marvel universe
It's the same old story, all over the world.
A child goes missing. Their family alerts the proper authorities. A search is made. Public interest is roused. Campaigns are started. Celebrities make appeals. Sometimes the child, or what is left of them, is found, and sometimes the child is never found in any state, nothing but hair or items of clothing or shoes. Sometimes the culprit of their disappearance is arrested, and they are tried, and they are charged, and they are put in prison. And the public forget and the celebrities forget, as they always do, until another child goes missing, and it begins again. And that's not counting all the children who slip through the cracks, the ones deemed not important or their story not interesting enough, and the many, many children who are now running away from home and whose families never bother to search for them because they are too much trouble to keep, or they are too violent, or they are different and wrong and inhuman.
The same old story.
This appeal is different from those media hyped ones that never seem to work in any case, however, in that the one who has gone missing is not a little white girl but a teenage half-Chinese boy, William Foster. The reason the general populace is interested at all – teenage boys can get stabbed or beaten to death in the streets in this country and people will hardly raise an eyebrow at reading of it in the newspapers or seeing it on the television – is because William is the son of Mark Foster, an important business man who sponsors many government labs, and a theory has been hatched that he has been kidnapped by mutant terrorists who intend to influence his father's actions. The eyes of the world are on England and wondering at the plight of the young supposed hostage. Charles Xavier shakes his head as he sits in his mansion with Ororo and Logan frowning behind him, Magneto watches in amusement from his latest base of operation. Humans find it shocking and heartbreaking, mutants find it disturbing or encouraging, depending on where their sensibilities lie. William has become more famous now he has disappeared than he ever was when he was safe and unharmed.
But don't bother with all that now. William isn't the important one here, not anymore. He's only the catalyst of what is to come.
He's important to his mother, though, as she begins to cry as she blinks into the camera and speaks into the microphone set on the table before her, begging whoever has taken her son to bring him back alive and unharmed, please, please. She tries to hide her tears in a handkerchief, with little success. The heart of the hardest viewer must be softened, if only a little, in the face of her obvious distress. Her husband takes over, his face drawn and with dark circles under his eyes. He is nervous and his hands fidget, but sympathy will not be given to him, as he looks as if he would rather be anywhere but here at this point in time. He tells whoever has taken William, he will not show them mercy, be they human or mutant; they will regret ever having come near his family. He is hardly credible.
The reporters sitting in the room watch the two of them and note down their words and their pain, picking out the statements that will break the reader's heart and help sell the papers tomorrow; they are scientists, dissecting the vital organs from the dead meat of the body of their specimen. The television crew feasts on their sorrow like a nosferatu on a medieval peasant, glutting themselves and their cameras and their sound equipment on the mourning of a couple who have lost their only son. The members of the police force that are present are embarrassed, although they try their best not to show it. Secretly they are praying that for once they will be able to solve this as they have failed so many times before now and will fail so many times again; that they will bring a mother's child back alive and in one piece. They pray that they will not lose further respect in the eyes in the public, that they will not fail to find anything, or worse find a body, or worse still pieces of a body.
Pay no attention to them. Pay no attention to any of them. They're not the crucial ones. The reporters will write it down and deliver their work to their editors, and then they'll go back to their homes that they share with their families or partners or pets, thinking no more of poor William Foster. He's gone, and they don't think that he'll be coming back. Forget his parents. His father will, in the next few months, turn to drink; his mother will spiral into depression and need counselling. Forget the police. He's beyond their reach now.
They're not the ones we're here to see.
Look instead at the little girl, sitting back against the wall between her father's mother and her aunt, the only child in the room. Her light blue anorak, trimmed with white fur, is the only splash of colour against the muted outfits of everyone else and the only reason any viewer even looks at her, before dismissing her as unimportant. They are wrong. Keep your eyes on her, whatever you do. She's the one you should watch if you want to see something interesting. Look at her dark hair, and her dark eyes. Look at her as she placidly gazes upon her mother's tears and her father's stumbling threats, and their grief.
She's the one that you came here to see.
Do you see that large book she's holding tightly in her arms? A book on biology and the theory of evolution? That was a present from her brother, given to her at her eleventh birthday party, held on the day that he disappeared. It's been three days now and she's hardly let go of it since she heard the news; brother, missing, kidnapped. She rests her arms on the top of it, and her chin on her arms. Her plump legs kick slightly and her feet in their shiny leather shoes hardly brush the maroon carpet of the floor since she's so small; she looks as if she could be eight years old instead of eleven. Appearances can be deceiving, though, and this girl is deceiving everyone.
Don't look away, now.
She seems bored, you can see that. Her round face is dull, her lips pressed together as if she is sulking. All of the adults who don't know her assume she doesn't know what's going on, or what's happened to her brother. Those who do know her also know that she is fully aware of the situation, but simply have no idea how far or how deep that awareness goes.
Her name is Meili, named for her great-grandmother on her mother's side. She knows that her brother is a mutant. She thinks that she might be one, too. She knows why he has been taken away from her. It is here and now, as she watches her mother cry and her father threaten to no avail and feels the book under her chin, that she decides she will find William and rescue him, and punish whoever took him. And in just under six months this little girl will, of her own accord, have joined in the war between humans and mutants.
I urge you – don't look away.
But how does an eleven year old girl become a player in the game of war?
The answer is simple, a playground solution; she has to make people want her for their side, to be their friend, to make themselves dependant on her. She has to prove her worth. She has to get herself allies, adult allies.
And how does she do that?
Here's how Meili began it.
For a week after William vanished, she didn't go back to school. When she did, her end of year exams were just beginning. She sat through each one, completing them all. She scored full marks on every single paper, even the more difficult mathematical questions. Not long after that the whole of her year was given an IQ test, with measly excuses made by the teachers. She knew what score she achieved, and it was enough to mean that she was made to take a separate test under close observation, to check if she was cheating, which of course she wasn't. There were more tests, with her teachers growing more excited with each new display of her growing intelligence, and even her parents showed some morose interest. She let them be excited, but at the same time she implied that her intelligence wasn't new, and she had been so bored with holding herself back for years and styling her answers to conceal her intellect that it was a relief to let go. In the wake of William's abduction she was tired of hiding herself. She owed it to him, she said.
While she was raising eyebrows at school, in the evenings she was working incessantly on finishing what she had begun four months before William vanished from her birthday party; a book. Lots of eleven year olds write books, of course, but not many write about genetics and the comparison of the human body to machinery, constantly upgrading and conditioning itself to cope with the demands placed upon it. When she was finished she ingeniously managed to organise for it to be published in blocks in a scientific journal, under the codename Sophia Wiseman. It caused a sensation: the book, titled 'The New Modern Prometheus' in a moment of fancy by its author, and with each chapter named after a different mythological creature, sparked controversy of the highest calibre. Some lauded it, others condemned it, the newspapers inevitably latched onto the story by the third instalment and soon it seemed that everyone was reading or trying to read it. And a lot of people were trying to find the one who wrote it, for various reasons of their own, since whoever the author was they were obviously a mutant or a supporter of mutants.
Meanwhile, Meili completed the trio of achievements by writing a new program for a computer's matrix which meant that it could do more than simply follow orders – it could develop and learn in a manner that could never have been dreamed of before, much as a human child learns what is acceptable and safe, and what is not. It was cutting edge technology, even if she was only completing what her brother had started. Of course she planted it in the research files of the labs her father sponsored: the point was to draw attention to herself, but not obvious attention. If someone took the trouble to investigate doggedly, they'd be rewarded, but she didn't want to be acquired by any old hacker.
You see just how very clever she is? Meili was only eleven, and already she was preparing to auction herself off to the highest bidder.
Don't pity her; she'd despise you for it.
Once she had finished laying her breadcrumb trail, Meili would spend her days at school feigning interest at what her new tutors had to say, and would spend her evenings in her room working on her homework. She didn't talk much to her parents any more. Mostly she spent time taking care of William's pet lizard, which he had called Lockheed for some odd reason. She had never had a pet of her own before, and she liked Lockheed as much as Lockheed liked her. Sometimes she would go on the internet and watch the chat-rooms with mild interest, as people speculated about who exactly Sophia Wiseman was. It often made her smile. At times she would search for anyone using the codename her brother had come up with for himself – Scavenger – but in this area she was less than successful.
Dilly dally, shilly shally, they followed the breadcrumb trail that led to nowhere.
She hoped that someone would 'discover' her soon, although she had arranged it so that if she were unearthed for the wrong reasons she could not be accused. A human could be exceptionally intelligent, after all. They could write controversial books and design programs for computers without any need of abnormal power. If she was a prodigy, that didn't make her a mutant. But connect what she had done, in the correct order…and oh yes, it did.
She might have been pleased or sorry to know that the only person at this point who knew this was her new physics teacher, a woman called Tessa, and that was only because she was a mutant as well.
Tessa, more often known as Sage, is a former student of Charles Xavier in the comics; he trained her as a spy. Here she's an accquaintance of his, since they met before he started the institute, and she makes her living - for the most part - legally. Sage has a phenomenal memory, extraodinary control over her body, and the rather spiffy ability of jump-starting powers in those who have the potatential for it, though William and Meili's powers had already begun to take effect before she ever came into contact with Meili.
William and Meili Foster are competely made up by me (I just hope I haven't ripped off someone else's idea). Meili's powers - apart from being a brain box - will soon emerge; William, who isn't far behind her in terms of intelligence, has the ability to send his mind into any machine, even onto the internet, and access whatever information he finds. He can then do with it as he will, collecting, erasing or even warping it to his own design, and leaving no trace of his interference.
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