An: This chapter may get a bit on the technical but I'll try my best to limit it. Either that or I'll make sure things get explained eventually. I'm hoping not to scare anyone off with my little adventures in science. I apologize for any problems it may cause and I don't want to make it seem I'm playing up to being smarter or anything else. I just get a bit involved in the science of things. Feel free to ask for explanations or tell me that I'm being too science related. Flame me for it, if you want. I welcome anyone and everyone's opinion on my little adventure here and I'm usually good on responding to them. Give me all the criticism you want….I'm more than interesting in reading opinions!
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.
Angie had to give herself some small measure of credit. She held herself together and finished class despite the fact she was severely unnerved by the fact her daughter was projecting images into her mind. The little girl seemed totally unaware of what she was doing, still staring around the classroom with her unusual eyes and sucking on her hands.
There was no evil background to what Hope was doing. No intention to hurt of harm her mother, as far as Angie could sense. She was just expressing a need. She was hungry and associated a bottle with food. She wasn't trying to trick her mother into do something. Actually the images were preferable to the other way Hope expressed herself when she was hungry.
That being crying, just like any normal baby.
As soon as the children left to room, storming out into the hallway for lunch or class or whatever they had planned at the moment, Angie set about throwing her things in her bag. It was usually something she was frightfully neat about doing but, just this once, speed was needed over neatness.
Said bag was thrown over her shoulder and one of her hands was on the handle of Hope's carrier seat. Angie had every intention of using her other hand to open the door and get herself to either Xavier or one of the school's medics. Someone had to know something about what was happening to her daughter.
If they didn't know- which was just as likely- Angelina figured they could do something to figure it out. After all, Xavier's School was home to two of the greatest mutant minds in the world. That brain trust right there had to be able to help her, somehow.
No sooner had her hand touched the door's knob, the wooden portal swung open. There in the doorway, looking worse for where, was Charles Xavier. His expression was anxious, more anxious than Angelina ever had the occasion to see. She wanted to say he looked scared as well but that was something she didn't want to admit to seeing. Fear was not something she wanted to see blooming on the face of her long time headmaster and friend. She didn't want to believe that something as silly and as small as her daughter could scare the great psychic.
"You felt it too?" he, simply, asked, eyes coming to rest on the burbling baby in her carrier.
"I did, sir, and it's scaring me. I mean, she can't be expressing her powers. Hope's just too young for that," Angie babbled, glad she had someone to blurt out what she had been sensing to.
"I know but Cerebro doesn't lie and I've sensed it as well," Charles sighed, "I'm sure there's something we can do to help her. I just don't know what that something is yet."
To hear Xavier admit that he didn't know something was quite unnerving to Angelina. She always figured that Xavier had the answers to everything and anything.
Sharing several fast words, the pair headed for one the building's many underground labs. Since Hope was the only child with two mutant parents that they were aware of, there was very little in the way of scientific literature to say what was going on.
All the pair could do was head for the lab and resort to the poking and prodding tests that seemed to pervade Hope's short life.
For several long hours, Hank McCoy poked and prodded the unwilling infant. She screamed and cried her way through a long battery of tests. Like any baby, Hope wasn't exactly fond of doctors. Even ones who had as good an intention as Beast.
Putting off all other matters at the moment, since none seemed really all that pressing when compared to a very young child showing active mutant genes, results were a priority. There had to be an answer and one had to be found soon as no one wanted Hope's little power to harm her or, possibly more importantly, the other students in the school.
On a hunch, and since it seemed rather important, Beast also took a blood sample for DNA testing. Not that Hope's DNA wasn't on file already but it couldn't hurt to take another to scan. As unlikely as it seemed, something in her chromosomes could have changed. Such things were unheard off but when a child with two mutant parents was in question, anything seemed possible.
To Angelina, the wait was endless. She wasn't allowed to help in the lab, leaving the science trained mutant to sit outside and wait. To worry while things went along as organized as science related things sometimes did.
It seemed like an age later before Beast and Charles sat with the young mother and her sleeping daughter. She had been trying to mark papers but all Angie had managed to do was mess up grades. She was going to have to apologize to, at least, four students for making a mess of their papers.
"Now, you know that the onset of mutant abilities are linked with puberty and stressful situations. Now, Hope is far from puberty but she's already experienced a highly stressful situation. One that could act as a catalyst for mutant powers if it was strong enough," Beast started, earning him a strange look from Angelina.
"What sort of situation are we talking about, Hank?" Angelina asked, "Hope's a baby…that's sort of the no stress stage of life."
"Hope was born in distress when she was born. Now, most would classify birth as a stressor in the eustress category. That is, a type of good stress. It could be thusly categorized because the stress aids the baby in breathing. Easier breathing causes an easier change over to lung breathing allowing for an easier transition to life outside the womb," Beast explained.
Letting his words hang in the air for a moment, he continued, "Though this is a strong stressor, it is not enough to activate a mutant's 'X' gene. Hope is not an example of a typical birth, though. She was born in extreme distress due to her prematurely and bacteremia. Still, this would not be enough to activate the mutant gene we know Hope as inherited from at least one of her parents."
"So than why bring it up?" Angie snapped, though she didn't mean to do so, "If it's got nothing to do with Hope- Background information or not- I really don't want to hear it. There's already been enough medical mumbo jumbo in her short life."
Shaking his blue furred head, Beast pulled out a clean white piece of paper and a blue pen. On the paper he drew a rather large square and, within the body of the square, he drew two lines. These lines split the square into four equally sized boxes.
"Punnett Square, basic tool in genetics," Hank explained, telling Angie something he was sure she already knew, "You probably use these with the kids when doing Mendel's genetics."
Angie nodded her head, recognizing the figure. It was one of those classical genetics tools she always taught the kids, though many of them seemed not to catch on to using them as fast as she liked.
She watched with rapt attention, though, as Hank wrote on the top of the square a capital and a lower case letter "n." These same two letters- one over or next to each square- were written on the left hand side of the box. One could have written them on the right and bottom sides but it was more acceptable to only use the left and topmost side.
"Capital 'N' stands for the nonmutator gene or the 'normal' gene; the lower case 'n' stands for the mutator gene. Both you and Matthew are heterozygous. That is, you have one normal- capital 'N'- and one mutated gene- lower case 'n.' In a monohybrid cross, the chances are one in four that you have a homozygous child with no mutated genes. A pure 'normal' child who will never express any mutations. The chances of offspring like you and Matt- heterozygous- are two in four. This was the case I was hoping to see in your daughter. Like you and your husband, she would have a strong likelihood of showing mutant powers," he explained filling in the proper boxes on the Punnett Square.
He paused with only one box remaining. The bottommost right hand square-within-the-square. Angie knew what went in that single box but she was afraid to hear the truth, afraid to know what that box was going to reveal about her daughter.
"All of this," Beast finished, filling in the lone box with two lower case letters, "leaves us with the final one in four. This child would have two mutant genes. She would be homozygous mutant. A pure mutant child. Hope is that one in four possibility. She is a pure mutant child which may be the reason she is expressing her powers at such an early age."