I hadn't died at all. As it turned out, I had never been the Phoenix at all. Instead of being turned into a powerful telepath linked to an incredibly powerful cosmic force, I had been put into a cocoon. There, I recovered from the radiation damage that I suffered piloting down the shuttle while the Phoenix force somehow thought it was me and took my place. And so my cocoon rested under the ocean where the shuttle originally crashed until it was upset when an otherwise unimportant group of criminal scientists called the Enclave accidentally crashed their plane there. The Avengers and the Fantastic Four rescued me, and now that Magneto was leading the X-Men, they got me in contact with Warren. He Bobby and Hank had recently belonged to the Defenders before their erstwhile comrade Moondragon shattered it by attacking them. Warren gathered the original team together and announced that with his friend Cameron Hodge we would all form a new group, X-Factor. Disguised as anti-mutant hunters we would actually rescue mutants.
We encountered a few such mutants, such as the morlock Skids, the earthshaking Rictor, the flame throwing Rusty Collins, and Tabitha Smith, latter known as Time Bomb, then Meltdown. In the course of events, the Beast lost his fury form. (A year or so later he would regain it). We encountered "The Alliance of Evil," whose leader, Apocalypse, was far more older, powerful and power-hungry than we could imagine. And then during the Mutant Massacre, my sister vanished while Warren was seriously wounded and his wings injured. Hodge ordered that his wings be amputated. A shocked Warren took a helicopter ride which then exploded.
Some people thought Scott abandoned Madeleine. He did try to telephone her after he recovered from learning I was still alive, but his son had already been kidnapped. Later, when he returned to Alaska he was shown a corpse thought to be Madeleine's, while meanwhile the Marauders had removed all evidence of her existence. Later he would see her "die" again with the rest of the X-Men fighting the Adversary.
And we had bigger problems. There was one major problem with X-Factor: Cameron Hodge. Hodge was a devout Presbyterian who had unconscious feelings towards Warren. As this was not something he could easily admit, he repressed it into paranoid anti-mutant rage. He secretly formed an anti-Mutant organization called the Right, whose armored men wore happy-faces. He cut off Warren's wings, blew up his helicopter, and took over most but not all of his fortune. The worst thing, however, was what he did to Candy Southern. She had seen Warren comforting me and got the wrong impression. Before we could put things right, Warren was maimed, while Hodge waylaid her, imprisoned her and horribly tortured her.
We fought the Right, along with the surviving Morlock and new member Caliban, when we then faced Apocalypse and his four Horsemen. As we tried to stop them from ravaging New York we learned that Death was actually Warren, rescued by Apocalypse and his old wings replaced with powerful metal ones. We were able to convince him to rejoin us, and he became Archangel, but Caliban joined Apocalypse. We then looked for information about Nathan, Scott's son kidnapped by Mr. Sinister, while Archangel found Hodge just in time to see Candy die. This brought us to Inferno and our re-encounter with the X-Men and Madeleine. I was able to stop her from destroying her own son and she took her own life. We then confronted Mr. Sinister back at the mansion, and apparently destroyed him, though of course he survived. Even at the time, I could sense Bobby, Hank and Peter think Madeleine's death was too convenient, and I suspect they were right.
The X-Men returned to Australia. This was a mistake: they should have told Magneto and the New Mutants they were still alive. We briefly watched over the New Mutants, but they and our charges had to fend themselves when we were transported to a distant world and had to fight unimaginably powerful Celestials. The New Mutants and our young chargeswould end up being mentored by a strange one-eyed cyborg mutant named Cable, whose origins were at first shrouded in mystery, and then became needlessly and unnecessarily complicated.
The X-Men, after their confrontation with the Adversary had received a powerful gem that opened the Siege Perilous. Confrontations with Nimrod and the Master mold Sentinel, Polaris' "sister" Zaladane led to most of the X-Men entering it while Wolverine was nearly killed by a group of psychopathic cyborg thugs called the Reavers. He was saved by a young irreverent Asian-American mutant teenage called Jubilee who had stowed away with them. Pr. Mactaggert formed another team with a revived Banshee, Forge, a now sane Polaris, and Nightcrawler's magical girlfriend Amanda Sefton, while the other X-Men slowly reformed and a charming Louisianan rogue named Gambit, who had a tangential connection with the Marauders, joined the team. X-Men, X-Factor and the New Mutants all met fighting the anti-mutant apartheid of Genosha, who was working with what was left of Cameron Hodge.
Again X-Factor fought Apocalypse, and during the course of the battle, beings from the far future told us that the only way we could save Nathan was to entrust him to their care. Reluctantly Scott agreed. Meanwhile the X-Men reencountered Professor X and returned him to earth, only for us all to face the Shadow King, the first evil mutant Professor X had ever encountered, who had taken over Professor X's previously unknown son Legion (well unknown to me at least). We defeated him for good, but there was a price. Professor X lost the use of his legs, and Legion lost his mind.
So now X-Factor and the X-Men were recombined into two teams back at the mansion. The New Mutants now called themselves X-Force, Alex and Lorna and several other mutants now worked for the government as the new X-Factor, while Kitty, Kurt and Rachel had been working with Psylocke's brother Captain Britain and his girlfriend Megan as Excalibur, working entirely in Britain (and dozens of alternate reality Britains, but we don't want to go there).
Soon we had to confront Magneto, now definitely an enemy again. We also were part of an alliance with the Hellfire Club when the building was attacked by Sentinels led by the Upstarts. I switched bodies with the White Queen, she went into a coma, and her students the Hellions were massacred by Fitzroy, a cruel, sadistic energy absorbing mutant from yet another future. In turn he was confronted from another mutant, Bishop, a violent enforcer from the future. Bishop joined the team, partly because in the future he learned that one of the team was a traitor who would murder the others.
There was another climatic fight between Apocalypse, Mr. Sinister, Cable and Stryfe, the head of the anti X-Force, the Mutant Liberation Front. Xavier was nearly killed, and we ultimately learned that Cable was actually Nathan, who had grown up in the future, while Stryfe was his clone. In the end Stryfe was killed, the Professor was cured, and the mutant version of AIDS—the Legacy Virus was released.
One of the first victims was Mastermind. We went to his bedside and we nearly died trapped in his mind. We managed to get out, with his help and as he died he told us how sorry he was. Only now do I realize that I didn't really know him at all. Then Illyana Rasputin died. After the events of Inferno she had been turned back into the small girl she was originally. Her death shattered Peter, and so when Magneto showed up and asked him to join his Acolytes he accepted.
Yet in retrospect this was not such a bad time. We were all together, and despite such villains as Mojo, Exodus, Omega Red, Fabian Cortez, and the Executioner we were in relatively good health. Mystique and the government were sort of on our side, and we even made a half-successful attempt to redeem Sabretooth. And Scott proposed to me. He had proposed to Phoenix, and he had proposed to me shortly after Madeleine. The third time I accepted. We were married in a wonderful ceremony and nothing went wrong. Indeed, it made me forget the horrible thing that had happened to our former teammate a few months earlier…