Sergeant Manning watched Mutant #27 behind thick, fire-resistant glass. 

When the mutant was ordered, a weak puff of red smoke spurt from his palms and wafted into the air.  Sitting at a computer screen, a man in a lab-coat squinted at the colored layers a heat-sensitive scan awarded the small blast.  His lips pursed in time with the sergeant's.

"Why is he not responding?" Manning asked.

Beside him, a thin little stump of a man nervously tapped the tips of his fingers against each other.  "Well," Dr. Rieker stammered.  He motioned for Manning to join him off to the side, and the sergeant complied.  "That's what we've been meaning to discuss."

"Is it the serum?" he asked, fearing the worst.

"Oh, no," the doctor replied, almost good-naturedly.  "No, the serum is working just as it's designed to."

Manning blinked.  "Then, what's the problem?"

Despite the circumstances, the man before him excitedly wrought his sweaty hands together.  "Well, it's actually quite interesting.  It's the only case I-we've ever seen like this."

Behind his eyelids, Manning tried to stare up at the ceiling.  "Doctor, we could do without the fanfare."

"Right," he said a bit too quickly.  "Of course.  Well, I – the team you've assembled and myself – think that the subject isn't using the full energy he displayed prior to his detainment because…he simply can't."

The doctor's smile faded when Manning repeated, "He can't."

He nodded.  "Precisely."

Manning felt his blood pressure escalate.  "And why not?"

"Well, it was a surprise at first, seeing a subject refusing to follow a command," he prefaced in a surreptitious voice.  "But the serum had been administered at its proper time and measurement.  So we waited for the next dosage."  His hands opened outward.  "When the exact same thing happened.  He responded with a reaction only a twelfth of its original magnitude, if the reports from your officers were any indication of his full potential.  We worried at first that it meant that the serum was losing its hold, or that the subject could work up an immunity to the synthetic version-"

Manning spoke impatiently.  "Doctor, have you isolated an explanation or not?"

Noting the irritation in his superior's tone, Dr. Rieker quickly condensed his speech.  "We looked into his records.  Now, whenever your team surveyed their movements…" He flipped to the beginning of the pages in the binder.   "He and his sibling were never examined apart from one another," he said, squinting through glasses disproportionately sized to his face.  "Now, your team has separated the siblings, perhaps by hundreds, possibly thousands of miles."

The look on Manning's face showed his apparent lack of comprehension.

Licking his lips, he continued in a slow, exact tone, "We've come to believe that the extent of their abilities depends on their proximity to each other.  Together, they easily took on an entire army of your best forces, but apart…"  He put his pointer fingers next to each other and then pulled them back to make his point.  "They weaken."  He pointed to the mutant behind the glass.  "Drastically, in this case." 

As Manning breathed a difficult sigh, the doctor let out a short, perplexed laugh.  "It's really, actually fascinating, if you think about it.  That something so inherently psychological could have physical effects, especially against a serum designed to inhibit just those responses."

Somehow Manning was not willing to share in the doctor's enthusiasm.  "I trust your team has prepared some a semblance of possible solutions."

The doctor's face grew ashen.  "Well."  He tapped the tips of his fingers nervously across the edge of the binder.  "Well, no."  At Manning's frown, he amended, "Not yet.  You have to understand this is rather unanticipated.  It'll need to be researched."

"There is more than enough time to document scientific discovery," Manning told him.  His eyes stayed on Mutant #27 as he was taken out of the fireproof room.  "But this mutant's abilities are needed now, at their full extent."

The doctor shrugged his thin shoulders.  "Then… I suggest you retrieve his sibling.  By all logical means, that would serve the quickest solution."

Ah, yes, Manning thought.  His other headache.  Of course, the sergeant had tried the usual means of locating a missing person.  In most circumstances, an assailant was found when they returned home, in search of asylum.  He had stationed several of his men to watch their house, her school, and the surrounding neighborhood in case the girl should call upon her family or friends for comfort.  Unfortunately, she had not been foolish enough to call upon the predictable venues.

With every passing day, retrieving his sibling became less and less of an option.

"And if we cannot, what would be the best course of action?" he asked.

The doctor paused, suddenly studying the page in front of him, as if the computer printout held all the answers to his every concern hidden between the lines.  "Well.  We would have to delve more deeply into the underlying inferences.  Try to use behavior modification exercises to get the subject to harness his full power."

"And how long would you presume a program like that would last?"

"Weeks," the doctor conjectured uncertainly.  "Months.  It would all depend.  It would be a completely revolutionary procedure with no known results to anticipate."

"Start it," he said pointedly.  "I want a daily report of your progress."

"Of course."  He smiled eagerly as he received his superior's blessing.  "We'll work as quickly as possible.  I'll have the first results on your desk tomorrow morning."

Manning nodded.  "I'll anticipate it."

When the sergeant left, Dr. Rieker immediately gained the attention of his team and debriefed them on their assignment.  They stayed in the laboratory throughout the night, brainstorming ideas and assembling a plan of action.  Finally, as the early morning hours gave way to daylight, they officially initiated their project, dubbing the experiment – The Psychosomatic Modification of Mutant #27.

Through Dr. Rieker was in charge of the experimentation, an entire company of doctors aided him in creating its abstract.  Under the consensus that the mutant was responding on a neurological level to the absence of his twin sister, the doctors theorized that putting the mutant's system under direct biological stress would cause him to react out of inborn survival instincts, thereby forgoing his mental restraints.

Through a series of shock therapy that grew in intensity, the mutant's body was put into a state of distress, and already on the first day, considerable progress was made.  In reaction to the electricity coursing through his veins, the mutant's power intensified, and as Rieker declared, a scientific breakthrough was made.

The electric shock administered to her brother steadily increased in voltage, and miles away at Xavier's School for the Gifted, Nora Blaize flung her blankets off of her body and awoke with a start.