Scott Summers saw the world around him transform into blinding whiteness. As the light faded and his vision returned, he found he now stood in an entirely white room. Padding covered every surface from the floor beneath his feet on up to the ceiling overhead. Making things more unnerving was the fact that there were seemingly no exits. The spartan surroundings combined with the ribbed pattern in the pads made the room resemble something out of a mental institution. If this was Ms. Frost's way of allaying his concerns, she wasn't exactly off to a great start.

Scott noticed that his field of vision had narrowed, and he sensed he was now wearing his combat visor. Looking down, he saw he had also apparently donned his leather field uniform. Interesting. Mostly weird, but interesting.

At first, he thought that the room appeared to be empty, but then Scott sensed a shadow looming from behind him. Turning around, he jolted and gasped in shock. There, hanging above a simple wooden desk chair, was the dead body of a twentysomething young man, dangling from a noose tied out of bed sheets. The noose seemed to be secured to nothing in particular; instead, it appeared to morph into the padding on the ceiling and become one with it, defying all logic.

Okay, this definitely wasn't comforting him.

"Sorry about that," came a voice from behind him. Scott turned around again to see Emma Frost, wearing an elegant white gown that trailed behind her. White satin gloves covered her arms up to her elbows. She was eyeing the hanging dead man.

Scott jerked a thumb in the direction of the corpse. "What in the hell is that?" was all he could sputter at first. Then he looked around him, suddenly remembering that the rest of his surroundings weren't much better. "What the hell is this?" he added, gesturing at the room's walls with both hands.

"Relax," Emma said calmly, raising a reassuring hand. "This is my default headspace. The place where my mind wanders when I'm not focusing on anything else."

Scott's brow furrowed. The answer didn't improve his disposition. "Your default headspace is a padded room with a dead man in it!"

Emma's eyes bulged for a moment, but she maintained her composure. "That dead man is my brother," she said emphatically.

Scott didn't think that made much more sense than before. His befuddled expression held fast, and he simply shook his head to further convey his confusion.

Emma sighed. "Listen… I can see where this is going, so just let me start at the beginning. You wanted to know me, to know what going on in here, so I'm going to help you do that. And I assure you this will all make sense when I'm done."

Scott's face fell. This was obviously her way of telling him that he wasn't going to be getting an immediate answer. Sighing, he resigned him to that fact. "Okay, shoot," he said.

Emma briefly nodded her appreciation for his patience, then began. "I grew up in Boston. My father was an Englishman who came to the states to make his fortune. A real self-made man… not to mention an insufferable bastard. He founded Frost Industries with funding obtained through numerous manipulations — blackmailing politicians and that sort of thing. My mother wasn't much of a prize, either, but compared to daddy, she's bloody well eligible for canonization."

As she paused, Scott folded his arms. He didn't have the slightest clue where this was supposed to be going.

"So anyway," she continued, ignoring his posture, "he met an American and married her and they had four lovely children — three girls and one boy, and they all lived miserably ever after." She paused to smirk and shake her head. "My father treated each of us like more playthings for his manipulative games. One day, while I was in high school, I went to him and told him that I had decided what to do with my life; I wanted to become a teacher. Daddy was furious that I might pursue something so low in pay, so low-class, so he gave my school a hefty 'donation' and arranged to have my favorite instructor fired. An abject lesson that any inspirations that were contrary to his wishes would be summarily dealt with."

"Obviously, it didn't work," Scott interjected.

Emma smiled. "On the contrary, he only strengthened my resolve. But now we arrive at the point of all this backstory, which is that my brother, Christian, made it into his early twenties and began to work at my father's company without ever letting it slip that he was, in fact, secretly gay."

Suddenly, Scott understood. "But then your father found out," he said slowly.

Emma nodded. "He paid the police to plant narcotics on Christian's boyfriend. That poor young man was imprisoned, and yet another life was destroyed by one of my father's precious 'lessons' to his children."

Scott looked up at the body hanging in the back of the room. "So, Christian… "

"It was my fault."

Scott turned back to Emma. The steely, cold resolve she usually displayed had completely shattered now, leaving only an expression flooded with sadness and guilt. "Christian became so depressed when he lost the man he loved… he fell into drugs. Heavy stuff. Heroin and the like."

As she spoke, Scott saw the far wall fading away, the padded white surface vanishing into nothingness, only to be replaced with a new expansion — a posh private office that appeared to grow right out of the white room. The room had hardwood floors with a cherry finish and white walls that were adorned with ornate lamps. A young blonde girl was there, speaking intensely to an older man. It was immediately obvious that the girl, who couldn't have been older than 18, was a young Emma Frost. She was saying something that Scott couldn't hear, as though someone had put this strange vision on "mute." The older man, a balding and gruff-looking guy in his fifties, sat behind the desk and listened to her, watching her every gesture with stony, calculating eyes.

"My brother was the only person who was ever there for me, the only person who really seemed to love me," Emma continued. "And I was desperate. I didn't know where to turn, so I did a stupid thing… I asked daddy for help. I told him what Christian was doing and begged him to put Christian into rehab. Instead, daddy had him institutionalized."

The scene behind Emma faded once more, the padded wall coming back into view. Scott understood that he had just seen exactly what Emma had described.

Emma looked down at the floor. "Christian didn't last long after that," she finished.

Cyclops looked around the room, studying the walls. He half-expected them to start fading away again, but instead they held fast as another thought came to him. "If he was institutionalized in a place like this, then how did he-"

"He wasn't," Emma interrupted. "The hospital didn't believe him to be a danger to himself. He was put into a normal room with furniture and, as you can see," she said pointedly, nodding towards Christian's hanging body, "bed sheets."

Scott was quiet a moment as he tried to piece that together… and quickly gave up.
"Then what are we doing here?" he implored.

Frost rolled her eyes at him. "You're visiting a purely mental plane, Mr. Summers," she explained. "Physical concepts of linearity or cause-and-effect need not apply here. Just look at your clothes," she noted, gesturing towards his outfit. "They're completely distinct from what you're wearing in the real world. Just like mine," she added, patting the side of her gown with her right hand. "What you're seeing now is a projection of your mental self-image. Apparently, you define yourself as one of Xavier's little soldiers."

"I do think of myself as an X-Man," Scott acknowledged. "And I thought you wanted help from the X-Men. Belittling us for what we do isn't the way to get it."

Emma showed no sign of backing down. "I know that," she admitted. "But you must understand that I've only recently come to accept what you people do. For a long while, I believed that mutants should just mind our own business. Ignore the actions of our more radical brethren, and ignore the threat of humanity as well."

Cyclops had to chuckle in total disbelief. "Do you even realize the irony of what you're saying?" he said. "You think humanity is the threat! That's exactly what they think of us!"

Emma didn't flinch. "Once I tell you what this place is," she said calmly, "I think you'll understand why I feel that way. Because this," she said, gesturing at the walls with her arms, "was the site of the other defining moment in my life. Or at least my other defining failure."

"Okaaay…" Scott replied, clearly not getting it.

Emma stepped closer. "You see, when I was in high school, test answers seemed to just come into my brain, and I didn't think much of it — subconscious memory, I figured. Soon it became clear that many of the voices I was hearing inside of my head were not my own. I thought I was probably going crazy, at least at first. I was terrified, afraid of what my father would do if he found out. But as I began to repeat the things I heard inside my head aloud to those around me, I found that they seemed to be… true, or at least true to what those people believed. So I figured I was a psychic or something, you know, like the people who use tarot cards and whatnot."

"Mutancy wasn't a well-known issue back then," Scott answered sympathetically. "I didn't know what the hell was wrong with until Professor Xavier showed up at my door."

She cocked her head to the side a little, nodding. "Precisely. So anyway, when Christian died, I was 18 — a legal adult — and I decided I'd finally had enough of my horrid family. I told them all to rot in hell and set out on my own; took the measly 400 dollars I had to my name and hit the streets. I was sure that I could use my psychic skills to make my way in the world, and for a while, I did all right. First I headed to New York and parked myself in the business district every day, listening to the inside knowledge of the corporate bigwigs as they came and went. Each day, I'd invest a little bit of my miniscule fortune into stocks based on what I heard there, and each day I'd make a bit more in return." She smiled. "I was utterly certain I had everything figured out at that point. I even met a boy who I foolishly believed was destined to be the love of my life."

Scott nodded ruefully. "Of course there was a boy."

Emma nodded back. "There's always a boy," she agreed, half-smiling. "This one was a young broker named Ian. I was with him when I first realized what I was. The general public was just beginning to confirm the existence of mutants. A few freak cases had caught the media's eye. And as I heard about the variety of symptoms these people had, I immediately suspected I might be like them. Of course, Ian was the only person I trusted, so I tried to talk to him about it. He was disgusted by me. He didn't want to believe it."

As she spoke the last few sentences, Cyclops noticed the shadow that loomed over him vanishing. He turned again to see the body of Christian Frost disappear along with the chair that sat beneath him. In the chair's place, the image of that same young girl Scott had seen just a few moments earlier faded into view, quivering with fear on the floor of the padded room. She was wearing a hospital gown now, and she cried as she beat her hands against her forehead. Scott cringed at the sight.

"So he had me committed," Emma finished. Her voice had turned hard again, and Scott looked at her to see her eyes shimmering with pain and anger. "He told the doctors that I heard voices and needed professional help. Which was at least half-true." She sighed. "And I, of course, was still too idealistic to realize that honesty wasn't going to help me. So I tried to explain to the doctors that I was a mutant. I could hear their thoughts, I know they believed me," she declared, narrowing her eyes. "They just didn't care. They liked keeping me locked in solitary. One less mutant freak to worry about."

Scott was still watching the teenager lying on the floor, her eyes darting around nervously. "How long were you in?" he asked softly.

"A little over two months," Emma muttered with disgust.

"How'd you get out?" Scott continued.

"I accidentally discovered the full extent of what I was capable of," Emma explained as the image of her younger self faded out of view. Now the room was completely empty save for the two of them. "I wished so hard for them to stop believing me, to decide that I wasn't a mutant and to declare that I was perfectly healthy… and then, one day, they did. The doctors came to me and spoke exactly the words I was thinking." She smiled a little at the memory, almost as though she was proud of it.

"You controlled their thoughts," Cyclops observed flatly.

"It was the only way," Emma responded. "Otherwise I'd still be in that hellhole, lying on the floor, wondering why even God had abandoned me." She gritted her teeth, anger bubbling up from within her. "So there it is. You want to know why I believe we have the right to use our powers on humans? You want to know why I think they're the threat? They're the majority. They outnumber us everywhere we go. Go take a walk down the streets of New York. Shout to the rooftops that you're a mutant, and see how far it gets you. You'll be pounced on and caged and tortured like some goddamned animal. Maybe it won't be the government that'll do it. Maybe it'll just be a couple of yokels who are out for kicks, perhaps some frat boys who decide it'll be fun to chain up a mutant girl in their basement so they can spit on her and rape her and watch her bleed while they laugh. That's why I used my money to start the Academy. To protect young mutants from going through what I did. Or maybe going through worse. Maybe they'll just get it so hard from their families and friends that they'll decide it's not worth it, and they won't be as lucky as I am. They'll wind up like Christian. That's why I feel no guilt in using my powers to read the humans. Because I need to know what they're thinking, and I need to know it before they decide to pick up a crowbar and show me what they're thinking."

Scott took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. He felt for her, but that didn't mean he excused her. "That's why you intended to ignore them," he ventured. "So you could belittle them, and then maybe they'd see what it was like from your end?"

"No," Frost said, shaking her head. "I was so angry with humanity that I wanted to treat them like they were beneath me, beneath all mutants. That's why I wanted to ignore them and any threat they faced from other mutants. Because I was certain that if you put me alone in a room with one human being, and we each knew the true nature of the other… well, I knew I would never blindly attack my companion. Yet even so, that person would probably love to attack me."

Scott scoffed. "If you honestly don't think that mutants are just as capable of petty hatred-"

"I've known a couple," Emma admitted, her face softening. "But the more relevant issue for me was whether there were any humans out there who wouldn't judge me or fear me because of how I was born. For a long time, I felt that this wasn't a matter of individuals who had been instilled with prejudices. It seemed more like society as a whole was rejecting me."

Scott relaxed a bit. "So what changed your mind?" he asked.

Emma smiled now, and for the first time, her face seemed to radiate warmth. "After I made enough money," she expounded, "I started to donate to a lot of gay and lesbian causes. You know, in memory of Christian. One day I got a call from the president of some Gay Alliance group."

Off to Scott's right side, another wall was fading out of sight. This time it faded into an outdoor café. Emma Frost, roughly the same age she was now, was sitting and laughing with a wiry young man with tousled blond hair.

"He wanted to meet me in person, to thank me for my assistance," she continued. "I don't know why I agreed to it. I guess it was sort of a whim. I must've been feeling especially adventurous that day, because when he finally got the nerve to ask me why I was so interested in his cause, I spilled the whole story. Christian, my mutant powers… everything." She paused. "He just laughed and claimed that he understood. I searched his mind, and I couldn't find any traces of fear or discomfort about me. He thought I was just like him — scared of being judged." She shrugged. "I guess he really did understand."

As the image of her memories faded out of view again, Scott turned away from it and looked back at Emma. He stared her directly in the eyes, searching for a sign — a sign of dishonesty, a sign this was a tick. After a long beat, he spoke. "I… truly am sorry about what you've gone through," he began, his voice soft. "No one should have to experience that."

"I agree," Emma answered, a sad smile appearing her face. "So do you understand the reasons for the opinions I hold, or have held?" she asked imploringly. "Do you believe I'm telling you the truth now?"

Cyclops' face became stern as he considered that for a moment. After a few seconds of silence, he finally spoke. "Yes," he answered. "I believe you." Rolling his eyes skyward, he looked at the ceiling of the room again. "But I gotta say your… 'default headspace' doesn't seem very healthy."

"I'm aware of that," Emma said quietly.

He returned his gaze to her face now. "Over the years, I've learned that young mutants have a habit of blaming themselves things they can't control. Sometimes it's the frustration of being what they are… other times it's the realization that, even with their abilities, they can't go out and be Superman and save the world." He paused for a beat, swallowing. "Anyway, I don't agree that what happened to your brother is your fault," he continued, his voice resolute.

Emma looked sideways, considering his statement. "I don't always agree with that either," she confessed. "But more often than not, that's what I come back to. And like it or not, these are the defining moments in my life."

"I suggest you make new moments," Scott said flatly. "However… I'm not making you any promises. I haven't seen enough to prove we should help you.'

"Oh?" Frost inquired, the edge returning to her voice once more. "Still not satisfied?"

Scott shook his head. "No. I need you to show me the Hellfire Club."

Emma nodded, and as she did so, the room around them went dark.

Two standing cauldrons lit up around Scott, flames rising up from within them. The cauldrons appeared to be white marble, and in front of him he saw a red carpeted staircase leading up to a lavish wooden table. A slightly younger Emma was there, sitting at one end of the table and decked out in a skimpy leather corset — white, of course — along with spiked heel boots. A tall, balding man with dark hair and dark eyes sat beside her. He wore a charcoal suit which did little to hide his impressive musculature. To that man's right was an overweight fellow with long red hair and a large beard. He seemed even taller than the last guy, and his style of dress made him look like he'd escaped from the colonial era four centuries ago. Seated beside him was the only person at the table dressed in somewhat normal attire — a man with a thin mustache and a long black ponytail. His complexion was darker than that of the others, and he was wearing a zipped-up leather jacket on top of a pair of faded jeans.

"Apologies again," Emma suddenly said, startling Scott. She had appeared on his left side, once again dressed in her elaborate gown. "I imagine this is all somewhat unnerving to you," she continued.

Scott's eyes went back to the table at the front of the room. "It's… discomforting, yeah," he admitted. He didn't say anything else. He expected Emma would launch into an explanation of their surroundings soon enough.

She didn't disappoint. "So, this is the ceremonial room of the Inner Circle," she expounded. She smirked. "Don't mind the torches, it's just for effect. They do have electricity, I can assure you."

"And these are the members of the circle?" Scott asked, nodding towards the table.

"They were in my day, anyway," she told him. "There were four of us then, and the only one I know for certain is still around is the man to my right, Sebastian Shaw." She indicated the well-toned guy in the charcoal suit. "He was the one who tried to recruit me after I made it out of the asylum. I didn't know who to trust or where to go, so I took him up on it. It certainly paid well enough."

"I imagine that the promise of mutant empowerment helped a little," Scott added dryly.

Emma gave him a strange look, then nodded once. "Yes. I'd had more than my share of hateful humans by that point."

"So they're all mutants?" Scott asked, changing the subject.

"Yes," Emma confirmed. "The one on the left, with the ponytail… he called himself 'Forge.' He could instinctually build any construct he saw, like his subconscious understood the engineering of any machine. Not so good with making new devices, but he'd build you a minigun if you needed it. The big chap next to him is Harold Leland. He could increase or decrease the mass of any object — or person — within a range of, oh, about 10 meters or so."

Cyclops inhaled sharply. "I suppose long-range attacks are best, then."

"Quite," Emma confirmed. "And lastly… well, I was never quite clear on Sebastian's power. And unfortunately, I was both too respectful and too afraid of him to try and read his mind to find out. I only saw him use his abilities once, on someone who was trying to break into the club, and it seemed like he just got stronger and angrier whenever the man would try to strike him. So of course, Sebastian won. And then he… he took… uh… oh god."

As Scott turned to see what was bothering her, Emma pinched the bridge of her nose in pain. Then, beyond her, to her left side, he saw a new image appear through the flames of the nearest cauldron. It was the outline of Emma herself, dressed in the corset she was wearing at the table… but now she was standing, reaching out towards a man on the floor in front of her, laughing as he writhed in pain. Scott gritted his teeth as he watched the man open his mouth wide, screaming silently.

"I… tortured him…" Emma said with difficulty, as though the words were squeezing their way out of her in the most agonizing way possible. "I hated people… hated them so much — oh, god." She scowled and bared her teeth, and at last the image in the flames swirled out of existence. And then, with a terrible suddenness, the whole room fell into darkness again.

Scott was quiet, maintaining a serious calm. When Emma opened her eyes again and looked up, he saw tears glistening on her face. She quickly turned away for a moment, and when she turned back, the tears had vanished.

"Sorry," she said in a monotone. "Anyway." She cast her eyes downward and tried to continue, speaking stiltedly. "It was… mental. Mental torture. Attacking his mind, forcing him to receive signals of pain, making him see things… all the most… terrible…" her voice finally trailed off, and she swallowed hard.

Scott's voice was quiet. "What did you want from him?" he asked.

When Emma looked up and met his gaze again, her eyes were wide with a combination of horror and lingering anger — at who or what, Scott wasn't sure. "Just suffering," she replied weakly.

Scott set his jaw and remained silent for a bit. "Did you ever kill anyone?" he then asked.

Emma looked away and shook her head quickly. "What does it matter, though?" she finally asked back. Cyclops didn't say anything.

Looking back up at him, the woman's eyes flared in defiance now. "They're evil, you understand? And I was a part of that. I'll gladly give you excuses for my actions, but I doubt they'd be terribly good ones. Those were difficult days, and maybe I can never make up for the sins of my sordid past. But I can stop them from doing things like that to anyone else… if you help me."

Cyclops nodded slowly. "Agreed," he said. "And if you betray us, or even think about joining back up with your old pals, I give you my word that I will blow a hole the size of a watermelon through you. Deal?"

Emma smiled a little — either in weariness or sadness, it was hard for Scott to tell. "Seems reasonable."

And with that, the world was filled with white once again.