The days following the disaster of Christmas Eve were the worst the people of New York, and by extension the country of America, had ever faced in their lives.
No joyous bells jingled for the festive seasons as the death tolls were called. No gifts were presented as dead bodies littered the streets in abundance.
The laughter was replaced by cries of sorrow.
The entire world was in shock that no one knew when the New Year came and passed. The fact that something could cause such wide area destruction put all world leaders in states of fear and high panic.
The information that it was done by a mutant was even more of a reason for the leaders to panic as up till now, mutants had never shown such monstrous levels of powers.
The call for the shoot on sight order for mutants was at an all time high as the people affected were grieving and the world at large was in a stage of insecurity.
The mutant race was not only receiving negative reactions but also a healthy amount of positive ones.
It all started with a child claiming how a superhero that could fly saved her.
That was the impetus needed for the public to remember that it was also mutants who helped avert the disaster.
Men of the sea claimed to have seen a goddess controlling the storms and commanding the hurricanes and typhoons to cease. Some had called her a hero while others called her a goddess while some had called her for what she actually was – a female mutant, who against all belief, could control the storms and sky.
Some had seen men and women lifting cars and helping people, others had seen people who could fly, some who had wings like those of angels while some with the visage of that of the devil.
People had never been this open with the knowledge of mutant abilities except for how the government and the news portrayed them. And while it wasn't enough to offset the damage that had been done, it was at least a step in the right direction of how people saw the mutant race.
The idea of super heroes had once again been established and since that day, there had been numerous sightings of mutants with abilities going out of their way to help people either with or without a mask on. Most took it as a sign of atonement while others took it as a way to prevent further hate of the species of empowered humans as a way of saying they had more to offer than receiving biased hate from the ignorant public.
Regardless of the mixed feelings of the public, the government and its leaders took the tragedy as a sign to step up their game in case something like this was to happen again in their country.
And to combat the fear of mutants, they took to the adage of 'fighting poison with poison', and began recruiting mutants into special task forces. Whether they knew it or not or if it was done specifically, society was changing and going by were the days where humans were at the top of the food chain. By doing what they did, they were tying the new species to them with a knot that they hoped wouldn't be loosened in the decades to come. No one wanted a mutant rebellion after what they saw on Christmas Eve.
Speaking of Christmas Eve, a few specific individuals had to spend the night outside of their destroyed home with one of them sleeping through the whole of Christmas on the post-apocalyptic battlefield that was filled with flowing magma.
No one, not a single agent or government official, had the courage to wake him up as not just his size but the way his body shone red as if he was tossed into a furnace. No one knew what was happening to him as he slept but they had all received orders not to wake him up.
No one liked when their sleep time was cut short, no one. And none of the agents were brave enough to find out how the dude that could comfortably sleep in the midst of such environments would be like if his nap was cut short.
Fury had told them all to clear the area which they did even when the officials and news agencies didn't want to but the tremor that they felt as they insisted and the flowing magma worked as the perfect intimidation.
Fury had to put in a lot of effort to keep some parties of interest off the news even when he was opposed in his decisions by the council and the DoD. He had to explain to the President of the United States and other world leaders in the UN why he was adamant about safeguarding the identities of the people who were involved in the event of the Red Eve.
Fury's argument was that these were people they currently had no power over and you could tell how that hard truth provoked the fragile egos of the shadow leaders. Fury had to cringe on how they always thought that a nuke was their answer to everything.
He was only a substantial proof away from betting his other eye that Draul could walk off an A-bomb. He'd seen the man slapping missiles away like they were yesterday's breakfast.
He had to hold himself from screaming at the President when his Advisor proposed the idea of bringing Draul in under acts of patriotism and using his gifts to serve his country like every upstanding citizen.
For the first time since he couldn't remember, Fury's mouth moved faster than his brain. "You motherfucking cocksucker. He's probably as patriotic as salt is to an earthworm. If don't want another State-level disaster, then I suggest you shut the fuck up and sit your pale white ass on that imported Italian leather and let those who have any bit of brain power do the talking."
The entire conference room fell into silence for a few minutes with the advisor looking as if someone was asphyxiating him with a ten inch dildo.
"What about the SENTINEL project? I believe this is the right time to approve of it despite what happened in Russia. I don't think the citizens would remember that Massacre when something like this is still fresh on their minds. With the SENTINEL project, we would have our very own army to combat the rising mutant threat while at the same time not losing our human soldiers in scuffles against mutants." General Thaddeus Ross proposed which made Fury scowl.
Of course Fury wanted the SENTINEL project approved, but what he didn't want approved of was General Ross having authority over it. The man currently had his own small contingent of his loyal soldiers who only took orders from him that not even the President could move them.
General Ross was an old name in the Army which was the reason why most of his actions were overlooked. Out of everyone here, no one could boast of being more patriotic to the American flag as General Ross was. But there was something bad about being too obsessed with something to the point that it becomes a poison which was exactly how Fury felt about Ross.
"That is entirely another issue separate from what we are talking about, General Ross." Fury had to knock the old man down but Ross proved to be too much of a big dog to back down.
"It is, but if it was approved then what we are speaking of would no longer be an issue now would it?" Ross had said with a sardonic smirk.
The back and forth between the two continued on for the next few weeks that followed with them making no headway in concerns on what to do with Draul and the arising mutant vigilantes that had been appearing recently to which Fury said to leave them alone for now as the wiser choice would be to prepare as much as they can to make sure they could have a proper response when, not if, something like this happens again.
While they had the power of information and the public opinion, which they were very adept at in manipulating, they just realized how far they were in might. A fight between three mutants had scarred the entire country and put the world in panic. What then would happen when a group of similarly strong people fought? Would they just sit by and watch as everything was destroyed just because of a scuffle? What use would their wealth and authority matter if they lost their lives to one of these disasters?
Whether they cared to admit it or not, they were scared. Scared of the fact that they could be easily reminded of their mortality. Scared of what would happen when the mutants banded together.
Magneto's Brotherhood weren't given enough threat importance and look at what happened when the leader they thought developing rubber bullets to take him down lost his cool to whatever reason that they weren't privy to and almost sunk the state of New York.
Times were changing and they had to have some kind of combat power to put those empowered back in line.
While the world leaders were brainstorming how to retain every bit of their power in the changing times which was laughable if only they knew what would happen in the future, one of the main characters of the disaster took a trip to the country of Latveria and destroyed the compound palace of it's monarch with the words 'Better hope I don't find you' burned across the entire kilometers of land that Doom's palace was located.
Fury almost had an episode of stroke when he saw that on the news at night when he was sipping on his bourbon. Safe to say he had to abandon his drink as they council were getting the jitters like five year olds at birthday parties.
This happened on New Year's day, taking everyone important by surprise at the blatant act of terrorism but the character in question couldn't care less as he was still pissed that he was now homeless and the prices of houses had skyrocketed with almost a quadruple fold increase.
He had gritted his teeth before paying almost ten million dollars for a new mansion that was four times bigger that his previous one with double the rooms and spaces.
He was placated with the fact that he had looted some of Doom's things as he went around bombing the entire estate, and he had to admit that the megalomaniac had some good stuff. He had been prepared to fight Doom and kill the fucker once and for all as he did with Magneto but was disappointed as he had to return empty-handed, well not really, from Latveria.
That place was like an iron fortress with the amount of technology packed into it but, while he was never a patriot, he could agree with the American sentiment of bombing things to high hell if they proved too arrogant for their breeches.
He found some magical indexes on runes and other pantheons of magic but he couldn't make headway with whatever it meant. Didn't mean he didn't pocket it though.
He couldn't take much with him except for, well a shipload of some of Doom's tech, gold, fucker had a lot of that, magical tomes for when he started studying magic, which was the next on his list, and finally the pièce de resistance, Adamantium.
He wasn't surprised that Doom had a piece of this thicc thighed meat of a metal, well he was but not that much given whose house he was raiding.
He had never felt so much free and unhinged after the battle he had with Doom and Magneto. He could feel he was on the cusp of another evolution but it felt as if he was missing a few things and thankfully Doom pointed it out for him – Magic.
The reason he had slept the whole day after the battle was that the amount of energy particles his body had adapted to and assimilated were astronomical. The fight had been one of a scale he never knew he could contend with nor had he known that Magneto and Doom would get that powerful in such little time. He couldn't blame it all on his negligence as the head suspect was the Marvel-verse and its penchant for crazy power trips.
Doom's magic was what gave him the most trouble as some of the spells that hit him tore through his defense or just outright negated his durability.
Magic was such an hax that it wasn't even funny. There was no higher point or lower point to the craft except the level of mastery of the user. If Doom was that annoying with magic then he could only imagine how powerful the head hunchos like the Ancient One, Dr. Strange, the future Scarlet Witch and Morgan Le Fay were.
Doom wasn't as old as he was in the comics which was the reason why he wasn't stupidly powerful but unfortunately he was still as bat shit crazy as he ever was.
Being exposed to Doom's magic did something to him so Draul wanted to take that chance and see what his next evolution would be like if he added magic to whatever was mixing inside his body.
It has been three month since the New Year and the people of New York were finally getting back their semblance of normalcy after what happened a few months back.
Most of the roads were already undergoing reconstruction, the same with the houses but the things that were hard to change were the people's feelings.
The normalcy they were getting were in the form of the infrastructure. For how they truly felt, the hospitals and psychiatric institutions were the honest tellers.
The damage wasn't limited to people and buildings but also to their livelihoods. Corporate buildings fell, so also were different workplaces that suffered from that night.
Overnight, the amount of people that were jobless increased five folds. The President made the right move of directing most of the country's resources in order to get the city back and running but there was only so much that money could do. It couldn't erect the buildings and workplaces overnight. Nor could it bring back the dead and permanently handicapped.
The amount of suicides that followed were astronomical to say the least as the recently unfortunate handicapped persons and those who lost loved ones and family chose to end their lives as they couldn't live with the grief.
So it wasn't entirely true to say they were getting back to normal, albeit very slowly. This was a scar that would forever remain fresh in the minds of those unfortunate enough to witness that night.
A lot of people had speculations about what caused the earth's magnetic field around the city of New York to experience such drastic changes and the name Magneto had been brought up in more than one of those international debates held. It was also speculated that the US government knew those behind the attack but were refusing to divulge the identities of the perpetrators.
That caused a lot of unrest and riots within the state which most times almost resulted in public lynching of mutants, mostly those with physical mutations, which were stopped by law enforcement which most times further increased the riots and violent tendencies as it was seen as the government refusing the justice of the people to favor mutants.
The President didn't have much choice but to give out the name of the only identified perpetrator of the incident which was, the unknowingly dead, Magneto.
A hunt was put out for all identified members of the Brotherhood and different mutant strongholds and gatherings were busted which resulted in fights that saw both the deaths of mutants and officers involved. It was truly the dark times for the hunted race.
Unexpectedly, it was during this time that mutant campaigns were held. Debates were put forth and different mutants came out and defended their race. Their rights as people and a new species were put forth for implementation in countries all over the world.
Most of the problems that the mutants faced was that their race was closely identified with the names of terrorists and criminals such as the recent Magneto and his Brotherhood which painted a bad picture and some form of bias and stereotype when people and the ignorants at large heard or spoke of them.
It was a topic that was discussed heavily before the term 'Metahuman' was first heard.
It denoted what the evolutionary circle of humans truly were as it was proven, and also being factual, that a lot of people, over 30 – 40% of people being born today carried the X-gene, although it was dormant in more than 39.9% of those numbers. It meant that almost half of the people born in the last two decades, all had the probability of being born, even if it was a miniscule one, as mutants.
The new term was put forth by a man and woman named Charles Xavier and Ororo Munroe. The former a public figure and a renowned Doctor in Psychology, while the latter, unlike the former, was not well known but also was learned given the multiple Degrees in Literature, History and Language.
Their reasoning for the term was that everyone, humans or mutants alike, were all the same race with the former being the base and with the latter being those who evolution favored. Backed up with scientific claims of humans evolving from apes, they also put forth the acknowledged truth that was wholly rejected that mutants too in the same vein, were evolved humans.
It wasn't what the government or mutant hate groups made it out to be. The manifestation of the X-gene in people were completely at random and so also were their mutations.
Their debate with the Senate's and other international speakers sparked a war of words between scholars around the world.
Ignorance was bliss. But it was also a choice.
Slogans like; 'Mutants No, Meta humans Yes', were waved around either on media or in the streets. Different media platforms also supported the notion that metahumans should be given the same rights as their human counterparts. Platforms like Facebook, ViewTube, Fmail and Instagram also promoted this stance and openly supported it, even going as far as to fund some campaigns.
The proposition didn't fly freely with any storms hitting the craft. Hate from humans, and even some mutant society which still believed in superiority, which was true when everyone was being blunt about it as mutants were in fact superior to humans in more ways than one, rose against the campaign even as it held strong. No revolution started and ended in a day.
Due to the passive-aggressiveness of the campaigns, the government of countries felt that if it went further beyond what it currently was, a civil war might break out. It was also a little disturbing how people just openly hated something without even trying to understand, with no particular reason for said hate.
No one knew the reason for this, or rather someone knew but said man was currently mourning how much he spent on his house as the dollar suddenly inflated in just a few days. Having spent days trying to come to terms and acclimatization with his new height of prowess, he spent the next few weeks hunting down or rather tracking down a man known as John Sublime who was touted as the most dangerous man the mutant race ever faced due to his powers to possess any lifeforms except that of the mutant race.
Draul had to admit that he had absolutely forgotten about Sublime. Even though the danger that Sublime posed to the emerging race was sky-high, he wasn't a very major character all things considered. It wasn't until he was criticizing some people who actually took to media and said that the race should be locked up and the government should find a way to destroy their mutated genes that he started noticing something fishy.
Sure what happened on December 24th, 2003 was as much as a tragedy as any could occur and he also understood why people would be hell-bent on ostracizing and defaming the metahumans due to the loss they suffered and the time of grief they were still undergoing given that it was only three months ago that most people lost everything.
He could understand all that and also the fact that while this was not a good time to defend metahumans, it was also the best time to make the distinction known. He had been called on by Ororo to know whether he would want to take a more public stance but he declined. He was happy to be known as the ghost CEO and owner of the newest media giants. No need to put himself out there for more than necessary. It was something Marky solely agreed on as he wholeheartedly took on the role of Acting CEO, wondering why his partner wasn't interested in knowing how their company worked.
He wasn't complaining however as this was the best chance he had to make connections with those who are the true upper echelons of society. If only he was older and wiser to know that he was being used as the working horse that drove the money to Draul's purse. Sucks to be him, but that's something he'll never know.
Draul on the other hand, after a lengthy conversation with Ororo which ranged from states of affairs regarding those at the Mansion and metahumans at large to what happened to him that day.
He just ended up talking a lot with her during the past few months, mostly about politics which the dark skin woman was amused to see how much he hated it.
It was this time, before he had the chance to go virus hunting that Fury called him, talking about how the President would want to have a word with him. It should have been expected on Fury's part, maybe he did, but nonetheless the eye patched man enjoyed the stunned look on the President's face when the reply of 'Yeah, can't be bothered to lose more brain cells on a bunch of idiots in suits' spoke out in loudspeaker.
A lot of those in the room had ugly faces as most of them were in suits. Though Fury protected Draul's identity, the man himself was not even bothered to do so, meaning anyone with the right connection and a lot of money and power could find Draul's information. He was a famed name in some circles after all.
Draul's search for John Sublime bore little fruits which pointed him at the Hellfire Club. He didn't want to tousle with some members of that club right now, hopefully never. The only person he was worried about, or slightly fearful of fighting was Selene Gallio. As proven with his fight with Doom, magic was an all-encompassing art easily making it an antithesis to everyone, especially him.
Selene, as he recalled, was the Black Queen of the club and a very prominent magic user plus being a mutant and also an immortal vampire who had been around since way before mankind even started counting the days made her into a very frightening figure.
He didn't know how she compared to the current Doom but his millions were on her being stronger, and by a large margin at that.
He didn't know what Sublime was doing within the circles of the Club, but he knew he couldn't go in guns blazing and axe tossing.
Sure he could wipe them all out, but then again – Selene. He already had his things in order and was prepared to take the flight to Nepal to look for Kamar-Taj. He felt it was better that way than just knocking on the doors of the Sanctum Sanctorum.
He had already told Bucky and Steve his plans to learn about magic and thus would be leaving the country for an indefinite amount of time.
That had been his plan, it still is, but with the remembrance of Sublime, he had postponed the trip.
Sublime wasn't like the other people he'd killed, in that killing him was next to useless if he didn't somehow find a way to locate all of the bacteria he's infected people with.
He was torn between whether taking care of the infection problem now or waiting until he knew some magic. He didn't even take a second of pondering before he tossed the other option away.
The situation with the metahumans was already as dire as it could get, leaving it for how ever long it would take for him to be proficient in magic was a fools choice.
He didn't have anything against the Hellfire Club, which was saying a lot, not really, as he didn't care about almost anything, so as long as they didn't have anything to do with him, he'd happily go his merry way but when has things ever gone his way?
…
[Nathaniel Essex POV]
"Astonishing."
A man muttered as he looked through the data that he finally was able to procure about a specific mutant that he'd heard about.
His sources had told him that Magneto had gone to fight the mutant on Christmas Eve but no one had heard from him since that day. He presumed the metal master had wound up dead but mourned the loss of material and DNA he could have worked with had Magneto been successful.
But all was not lost.
"This information is gold. I might be able to learn what triggers the adaptive genes and apply it to myself after figuring out how to replicate and diversify its effect."
The man said absentmindedly as he worked on two screens while also reviewing the file in front him.
"I need a recently harvested DNA if I'm to further the test by milestones… Looks like I'll have to earn my keep just this once. How crass." He muttered.
What he had on hand, he was sure most wouldn't know its value, held the secrets to the formation and evolutionary process of the X-gene. If he could figure out the adaptive properties of the mutant who held these cells, then theoretically he should be able to produce any amount and type of mutations that he could think of, so far as he could calculate their reactive factors.
He contemplated on how he would go about acquiring the DNA of his recently favorite research subject and very soon a smile broke out on his face.
"Let's go with that. Hmm, yes let's."
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Read up to 25 chapters ahead at pa*treon /Draul_TheOminous.