Chapter four: The Exile

Sir Charles Xavier sat comfortably before a wall of monitors. Scenes rolled by in an almost random fashion. Hero's one and all, albeit in small ways at times. But how to choose?

Sir Charles sighed. How does one choose a successor when the job is to become the future?

When Sir Charles was chosen it was by the mystic known as Dr. Fate, or an alternate reality version of him. He was chosen by the Keeper before him and so on.

The Keeper lived alone in a space station enclosed in a semipermiable phase attunement field that kept it invisible but existing in all of time and space across the multiverse. The Job of Keeper was to maintain the passage of time throughout the dimensions.

Originally, as the universe began, time was a relatively local phenomena moving at variable speeds that were governed largely by electrical conductivity in the surrounding space.

It was during a war of conquest that the Keepers station was built. A race of Reptilian beings had learned to control time and had accelerated their own development both technologically and evolutionarily. They would have over-run the spiritual planes of existence with their own lizard essence as they passed away from possessing bodies to being of pure energy. Had it not been for the first Keeper.

The first keeper brought the station online and began phasing specific waves of gravity through an interdimentional discriminator, thereby creating a relatively stable passage of time through the overlaying dimensions in the local area. This field keeps the reptilian energy at bay, because as it enters the field it no longer moves in it's own limitless temporal nature but instead it begins aging an decaying within the field.

In this manner, all the alternate realities of the planet Earth were allowed to flower and bloom simultaneously. When one of these realities becomes threatening of the existence of the multiverse as a whole, it is the role of the Keeper to prevent such a thing.

So how to choose a worthy successor?

Sir Charles keyed a few controls and several of the screens winked out. Another few controls and another few screens went blank.

Soon he was left with only three choices. On one screen there was a small, slight woman. Chinese perhaps, wandering alone through a world of corpses. A survivor who knows what it means to loose a world. Sir Charles had never met her in his own world. He thought her and her counterparts rather brash.

The second monitor showed a young man with a catalog of powers. He was a singularity, unique among the multiverse. He wore his hair long. A fact Sir Charles noted with a smirk. The son of Logan.

The third monitor held Emma Frost. A different woman than Sir Charles had known and loved and lost to the Legacy Virus. To be sure, but watching her there, holding her dead, elfin lover.

The desire to save a life, to save all life, can be powerfully motivated by personal loss.

But perhaps not for this Emma Frost. Vengeance may be more her style.

Her monitor winked out as well.

The son of Logan... The words drifted through his mind. Sir Charles had known Logan in his world as well. They had been friends. Rivals for Emma's affections. In the end it was Sir Charles that had won Emma although Logan had remained close to her until the end.

And his decision was made. Logan, no matter which Logan, had produced a singularity. A near physical impossibility in a spectrum of infinite probability. And Sir Charles Xavier respected Logan. It was Logan who taught him that mutants were not all evil. A fact the all too human Xavier needed to learn in order to love Emma Frost, his world's most powerful telepath.

Sir Charles Xavier owed Logan. He owed the singularity too in it's own way. He owed it all his respect. Because a singularity was proof that life in all it's forms was still trying. Sir Charles was a Pseudo-Singularity; A human instead of a mutant, the only one in all of the multiverse. This meant he could travel physically between the worlds as though he were a singularity. If you were to attempt, with this equipment, to send a mutant Charles Xavier in to a world where a mutant Charles Xavier already exists a multitude of calamities may result.

One Xavier may cancel the other out and they would both vanish. One may absorb the mass and energy of the other. And more over, the Xavier's may begin displacing each other, pushing each Xavier in to a neighboring universe until one manages to come across an Xavier-less universe that would accept the displacement. Or they may all flood in to one universe and vanish from across the multiverse spectrum.

Or any combination there of.

Sir Charles hit the processing key and slowly keyed off the first monitor. He kept a strict emotional distance when it came to turning away from the young girl and her empty fields. There are worse things he told himself, although he could personally think of none.

With that, Sir Charles Xavier rose to his feet and braced himself on his wolfs headed cane. Age had taken many things from Xavier but none so precious as his mobility. He walked patiently down the hall at half the speed he did this time last year. A life in the service of life takes its toll.

Xavier stopped in front of the mirror. He pulled himself upright and brushed his long white hair back out of his eyes and smoothed his closely trimmed white beard.