AN: Hi all! I hope summer's going well for all of you. I just came back from Boston and Salem for the weekend. It was pretty cool to see all the stuff about the witches in Salem. I even got the chance to walk a few graveyards at night. Alas, though, I didn't get to see any ghosts though one of the tour guides managed to scare my sister so badly she turned as white as a ghost. That probably has to count for something, right? Anywho thanks for all your reviews and for putting up with the sparse updates. I'm really glad some of you are sticking around for the ride no matter how slow it seems to be going for me recently.

My PenName is . . .: I'm glad you like little baby Hope. She's a strange looking baby, no doubt about it, but she could be cute. She does act cute sometimes, though. Here's the next chapter and I hope you like it just as much as you like the one before it!

E.L. Lockhart: Order taken! Here's the next chapter! I'm happy the update made you happy and I hope this one makes you just as happy as the one before it!

Disclaimer: I own nothing except a handful or two of made up characters. All of this wonderful stuff belongs to the geniuses at Marvel Comics. I'm just playing in their world. I'm broke and in graduate's school. All I own are my Pointe shoes.

Living in a school meant that babysitters were never in short supply. If Angelina and Matthew ever needed someone to watch Hope, there were always one or two or ten people willing to take the job.

Students wanted it, especially those whom Angie taught, because they felt they were going to get some extra credit out of it. Get into their teacher's good graces and all of that. Though the couple did make use of the very willing and very abundant student babysitters, there was only a handful that they totally trusted and that was when Hope was healthy. If she was sick- as she always seemed to be- neither Angie nor Matt wanted to leave her with ill prepared students.

Staff members and other adult mutants helped because they were older and they were friends. Still there was part of her that was afraid to leave hope with then when she was sick. Even though there were a handful of staff members who were probably better qualified than she to take care of her own daughter.

At the moment, though, neither was a viable option.

Matthew was working, pulling yet another long shift at his place of work. Actually, it was his normal, during the day shift but, to a very stressed Angie who hadn't a lot of sleep the night before, it seemed like a late shift.

Almost all of the students in the school were in class. Some who weren't in class were in the medical bay as a result of a particularly brutal game of basketball. Someone had said "no powers" and that little comment wasn't heeded by the players. A kid had used his powers and managed to get five or six of his fellows had been attacked by a particularly aggressive length of poison ivy. Whatever the girl's powers really were, it forced the plant around her fellow students and accelerated the plant's topical toxin. They were all covered in blotches and itchy hives.

Other students were in the neighboring town, doing some shopping under the careful eye of Rose and Nick. Though going out with Nicholas was a bit of a problem because of his fame as a pitcher.

With Rose and Nick out of the picture and on chaperone duty and the rest of the staff teaching, Angie was without a babysitter.

She had really no other choice but to pack a bottle, some diapers, and other baby things in her pack of school books and the put her daughter in her baby seat. Though she was under a year old by several months, Hope was on her way to her first day of school.

While Angie struggled with trying to get her class to pay attention and her daughter to settle as she tried to start her class, Charles Xavier entered the room containing Cerebro. It was par for the course for the bald, wheelchair bound headmaster to enter the metal room and use the machine it contained.

Just to see if there were any other mutants in a spot of trouble. Teenagers coming into their powers who could benefit from being brought to his institute. A single life he could save that day and another mutant who could learn to accept not fear, what he or she was.

He lifted the helmet like apparatus and placed it on his bald head. The door behind him slid closed with a whoosh of air, sealing him in not only the room but in his own little universe. A universe where his mind was the most powerful item in existence and one that could either help or harm.

The machine started, startling the headmaster nearly to the point where he fell out of his chair. There was a new mutant emerging as he sat overlooking all of the mutants in the world. What's more, the mutant was coming into her- as it was a she he was tracking- own appeared to be in the backyard of his school. The preverbal backyard anyway as she was coming into her own powers in Salem Center, New York.

He tried to see through the mutants eyes to know where she was and to locate her if she were ever in need of help. It was a bit of a nasty shock when he discovered that the eyes of the mutant were trained upon the walls of one of the rooms in his school. She was looking out at a classroom of children from an odd vantage point, almost as if she was in a seat of some kind.

That seemed so unlikely, though, as everyone in the school was a mutant. Their powers had activated already. They were not an emerging individual.

As Xavier uncoupled himself from the machine, a thought came to him. A thought that sent a nasty shock of fear down his ruined spine and set ice in his stomach. There was one individual that wasn't a mutant. One that shouldn't have been coming into her powers but seemed to be anyway.

"It couldn't be," he breathed, daring not to believe what he knew was true and unequivocal.

He had to get to that classroom and he had to get there as fast as he could. There was something going on and he needed to be sure if it was true. If it was….well…then he wasn't sure what he was going to do next.

Meanwhile, Angie was regretting even bringing her daughter to class with her. Babies were the ultimate distraction, especially for the young girls. No one wanted to hear a word of the day's lesson. Rather they wanted to play with the baby and ask questions about her.

Though she was teaching human reproduction- Something Angie truly hated because it reduced most of the class into blushing, giggles messes. - and a baby was the ultimate study tool in such a lesson, Angie was not willing to have the whole lessons dedicated to talking about her daughter. Bragging was something she really wasn't keen on doing no matter how much she wanted to. Her Grandmother Galante had always told her that it was bad luck to praise a baby's actions all that much. It could bring ill luck on the baby and, given Hope's auspicious start, she wasn't going to chance it.

"Come on, guys, can we please listen up here?" she pleaded with her class, "I promise that if we have time at the end of today's lesson we can talk about Hope."

"But you're not going to give us time, Mrs. D," complained one of her students.

Another- the girl sitting next to him- added, "You're just going to keep talking and talking until the bell calls for classes to change. You never let us have any fun."

"Calvin, Susan, you do realize we live in this school. I live here and eat here with you guys all the time. If you want to talk about my daughter you can find me anytime on the grounds. I'll be more than happy to talk to you then," Angie responded, trying to get her students to understand.

"But Mrs. D," whined another student, "can't we just skip today's lesson."

"I'm with Sylvie. Let's just have fun. We can do this another time," added a young boy from the far right side of the room.

"Right guys, if you let us have a break today we'll be very, very quiet tomorrow and allow you to teach us double the stuff we would have to learn," another young boy- from the left side of the room- called to the class.

A chorus of agreement rose up from the students in the room. All of them agreed with the boy and his plan. Of course, they all also knew that it was highly unlikely that they were going to do what they had promised. It was hard enough to get through a single lesson. Imagine the problems getting though a double one.

"Alright….alright, settle down," she called, trying to get the class to quiet down lest Hope awaken upset by the loud noises in the room, "Sylvie, we're not skipping today's lesson and that's that. Del, Cole, we're going to do this now and you all know that you're not going to even want to have a double lesson tomorrow."

With grumble and mumbles of annoyance, the class started to settle. Maybe there was hope that they could scam some free time at the very end of class.

As she turned to face the blackboard, something very strange happened. An image of a baby bottle came flashing into her mind. Not just any baby bottle but the one Angie was carrying in her bag.

There were only two people who knew what that bottled looked like; her and Hope. She had showed the little girl the bottle as she put it into her bag. That was the only way Angie knew that it wasn't one of her students showing her the image to distract her.

With a blink of an eye, it all clicked. The strange presence in her mind. The fact that strange invader found comfort in her own mind and the fact that presence was so strong now.

The image was coming from Hope. She was the cause of the strange presence in her mind.