Chapter 6 Discovery
The necklace was fitted over Wanda's neck. Only Charles Xavier and Eric Lensherr were with her.
"Now Wanda, try to use your powers," said the Professor.
Wanda tried. Nothing. She began to get angry. Still nothing.
"I think," said Xavier, "we can tell her now."
"Wanda," whispered Magneto. "I am not the father you think I am."
"I'm not your daughter?" asked Wanda.
"You are my daughter. What I mean is that I haven't been much of a father."
"What are you saying?" Wanda began to get angry.
"Wanda, when you were little, your powers emerged. They were out of control. I did not have the time or the will to find someone to help you learn control. So I put you in a mental hospital. I... I should have checked on you occasionally. Tried to get you help so that you would be able to get out earlier, or not locked you away at all. I also should have looked after you and your brother more even before that, rather than visiting you occasionally while letting a friend of the family take care of you and letting you take his name."
"You! You bas-"
Charles winced as Wanda tried to strangle her father. Her hatred was so strong that he nearly fainted from its presence. He couldn't even get her to calm down, her brain was on such fire.
Just then Kurt 'ported in, with Talia on his shoulders. "Sorry to interrupt, but - Wanda! Don't! Please! Think of Talia!"
Wanda released her father's neck. He hadn't even tried to fight back. He was sobbing.
"Forgive me, daughter. It will work out. I promise."
Wanda couldn't stand it. "Who did this to me? Who made me think that you were anything but a monster?"
"Mastermind. I told him to. I... I had to stop you, you were becoming a liability. I... I didn't think in personal terms. Please, please..."
Kurt looked at Wanda and at her father. "For now, let's concentrate on the problems at hand, ja? And anyway, at least your father isn't a Nazi."
Wanda looked at Kurt. "So he hates wild-types instead of Jews and Gypsies? Oh, so his bigotry is different from your dad's, and it makes it okay? And I am supposed to be thankful that he put me in torture for God knows how long because at least it wasn't a death camp? I'm sorry Kurt, but 'not a Nazi' is rather faint praise. It's the least someone should expect. If that's all you ask for in a parent, is that they're not a Nazi, then you have really, really, low expectations."
"Ja, vell, at least you get zose low expectations. I don't even get them," Kurt started to cry. "How do I tell mein adoptive parents that my biological father tried to kill their kind? Vanted to take over for Hitler? Listen, Vanda, your father at least repents. My father vill probably be vhat he is until the day he dies."
"I can find and restore your memories, Wanda," whispered Professor X. "That will help you to deal with them."
Wanda completely broke down. "I'm glad you got this necklace to work for me. Otherwise, I'd have probably brought the house down."
Talia was shaking in fear. "What's wrong with Mommy?"
"Mommy is a little... upset right now. Listen, Talia, I'll take you back to your room, if you feel like it. You shouldn't have had to see this."
"I can go with you, Daddy. I don't feel so sick now."
Talia was slowly getting used to the sensation of passive teleportation. Most people found it an exhausting or sickening experience, which allowed Kurt to teleport others around as a means of fighting them. Usually after three or four 'ports, they would be unconscious or at least disoriented. Except, of course, for some like Juggernaut, who were almost impossible to teleport and who seemed to be unaffected when they were teleported. Talia had been as queasy as most at first, but she was fascinated so much by teleportation that she begged Kurt until he teleported with her anyway. Slowly it appeared that she was getting used to the sensation, so Kurt was getting more and more comfortable with using his power to transport his daughter places.
Kurt sighed as he thought of Wanda's new knowledge, of his own father, and of his missing mother. Tomorrow would be Thanksgiving, but apparently not a lot of people would be feeling very thankful.
* * * * * * * *
Meanwhile, in a small town between Bayville and New York City, the FOH were having their meeting.
"Now the mutant menace has reached a critical point!" thundered the speaker. "We have received word that Trask has finally been freed in order to help the government to counteract it! But the government's work is never enough! We must take it to the streets to capture each and every one of these evil abominations! For all we know, they are all working with that Satan's spawn that created that orb in Mexico!
"And," he continued, "there are rumors that the one who engineered his release is not a mutant at all, but rather a human who was altered by a mutant! I think it is time that we realized that mutants are not THE menace, they are a part of the menace. The real menace is all superpowered beings! And today we are bringing here a new ally to help us in our fight!"
A small bespectacled man stepped up to the podium. "I believe that I am about to perfect a drug that will temporarily rob mutants of their powers. It should also work on most other beings whose powers are the result of biology. As I understand it, though, so-called superbeings whose powers are purely technological, such as this new cyborg whom Tony Stark has hired as a bodyguard, are not a target of FOH anyway, so this drug will affect most of the people whom you are actually going to go after."
"That is right," continued the first speaker. Cybernetic suits and what-not do not alter a person's humanity, and we may need to use these at some point in our fight. But alterations of genetic structure are dangerous. And so they must be stopped. Both the X-gene and the G-gene must be eradicated from the planet! [A/N the "G" gene is sort of a creation of mine, but it is based on the comic continuity. More on it later]. This drug is a more refined version of the chemicals that caused Power8 to be poisonous to mutants. It can be injected via needle or even slipped into someone's food very unobtrusively. We are working on weaponizing it for use as a spray."
"Charles Overton," in reality J. Jonah Jameson, listened with great interest. Not only was this a great story, but he might have found a way to defeat Spider-Man! However, he began to get worried. He wanted the web-slinger caught, not killed. He also wanted him to receive a fair trial in court. The idea of a lynch mob catching him was painful, and if Jameson had anything to do with helping such an act, well, he would not be able to live with himself.
Outside, an attractive blonde woman in a curve-fitting white leotard listened intently. She slowly created glowing bolts of light with her fingers, raised them to her right eye, which had a sort of silver tattoo-like ring around it, and then reabsorbed them. She heard a noise and turned towards it.
"Hello, Tyrone," she said, brightening her demeanor.
"Tandy."
"Teleporting behind me again?"
"You need me now. I can sense it. Your psionic energy is getting too strong, as is my hunger. You need a drain."
"Okay." She let the strange man behind her engulf her. He nearly disappeared into the night, his appearance being so dark as to fade into dim light even better than Nightcrawler. Then he disappeared for real, teleporting himself and the woman into an empty alleyway.
The woman spoke first. "I found him. Dr. Malloy [A/N original character, the bespectacled man. He is not Colonel Wraith, he is designed to look like a mad doctor from a 1954 Sub-Mariner comic]. He is trying to use the drugs he developed again. Trying to use them to destroy mutants."
"It's not enough that he is one of the ones poisoning the children." The man frowned, although only his female companion would have been able to detect it. "He wants to use it to kill an entire race of people." [A/N his words, not mine. Technically, mutants do not constitute a race, as mutants are scattered mostly randomly around the world -although some groups have more mutants than others - and as most mutants arise from the general population. The term "race" refers to a group of humans who share multiple ancestors that people outside the group do not and who mostly breed with each other, or in Steve Sailer's terms, a partially inbred extended family].
"So Tyrone, we have to kill him?"
"Yes. Like all drug dealers, he must die."
Meanwhile, Peter Parker and Jameson were listening to the harangues of the next in the series of speakers. Jameson, who had a reputation for being in his office most of the time, had had to make a lot of excuses for his recent absences from the office for one or two days at a time. Parker less so, although people did notice him missing classes. Actually, a few members of the FOH had pulled some strings to get his absences to be overlooked.
Graydon Creed for his part was torn. He had a juicy bit of information that he was withholding from his new friends. He knew that one known mutant, Kurt Wagner, was physically grossly deformed, and that he had a daughter with similar deformities. But he couldn't bring himself to rat out his half-brother or his half-niece. He hated them for what they were, but in his heart he questioned whether or not he should make certain that those two were spared from being killed in the holocaust to come.
And they went on with their petty concerns, unaware of the role that their bigotry was to play in the master plan of one of the most powerful mutants, if not the most powerful mutant, alive.
For Apocalypse loved bigotry. Hatred. Racism. Anything that pitted humans against each other in a test of survival, he relished. To him, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, the gulags, countless war zones, were simply proving grounds for the superior. They would find a way to live while the inferior would be too lazy or stupid to save themselves and/or their friends. He actually felt that Nazism was a boon to the persecuted groups, as it forced them to be more resourceful. To the extent that resourcefulness was genetic, those with lazy or stupid genes would be killed so as not to infect the succeeding generation, and thus the best genes would be those that would dominate in the end.
Apocalypse saw nature as the only means of determining which genes would produce the best humans. No test could tell whether one person was better than another or not. Evolution had its own logic, and Apocalypse viewed it as an omnipotent god, which would inevitably produce the most perfect specimens if it were allowed to run its course. His mission was simply to get the ball rolling, to increase the evolutionary advantage of being a warrior as opposed to a poet or a fisherman. To start wars and chaos and to weed out the chaff with them. This would produce heaven on earth. The actual nature of this heaven, and the nature of the evolved beings that would inhabit it, were as of yet unknown. But Apocalypse took on faith that whatever world turning natural selection in favor of the warrior would result in would be perfect.
Sinister, on the other hand, deplored bigotry unless he could control it. He had no qualms about genocide. He just didn't believe that it was productive unless it was controlled so as to make certain that the right people were targeted. He believed that there were superior and inferior people, but their potential for power was the deciding factor. Death camps and the like were too random. The superior would only have marginally better chances than the inferior, and the killings would only marginally improve the species. Far better to use science to determine a person's likely potential rather than to test them in a trial by fire that they might fail by accident. Of course, some trials by fire were necessary to establish a base by which to estimate the power of various mutants. And sometimes such a trial needed to be added once a mutant had passed other screenings. But to just encourage people to kill each other and to see what happens? Stupidity. Or madness. He saw evolution as random, and believed that what the world needed was not a resignation to blind fate ultimately creating an ill-defined paradise whose shape could not be discerned but whose perfection was taken on faith, but rather a vision for what the perfect world should be and a determination to rebuild the world in a particular image.
Yet the FOH served his ends as well. Such hatred would help to drive mutants to him, or to drive governments to send their mutants to him, in hopes of neutralizing them humanely, or in hopes of turning them into mind-controlled slaves, so that controlled mutants could hunt renegades for them. Moreover, the more people were afraid of mutants, the more value the government would see in using mutants as weapons against foreign countries, again bringing to him more test subjects.
Of course, Sinister would need to be cautious as to how he did this. His existence was already known to at least a few people in the government, and so he couldn't risk taking their mutants in without creating a dummy corporation and covering his tracks well. But he had already done that and was preparing for his next move.
And the FOH kept paving the way for him.