If He had a favorability system instead, like some cheap dating sim game, it's almost certain she'd see a cute little +1 pop up from the system panel—+1 from the Phoenix Force and +1 favorability from Dark Phoenix. A ménage à deux of approval.
Too bad she didn't. In front of her was just Jean's slightly shaken expression and the heavy silence that followed He's st sentence.
Jean Grey blinked at her, frowning, as if she were trying to shake off the weight of the words. What He had said… it hit a little too close to home.
There was truth in it—a truth that nestled uncomfortably in her mind like a splinter under the skin.
When she thought about it—really thought about it—how many mutants actually liked their powers?
Aside from Charles and Magneto—two men who had practically made a lifestyle brand out of their mutations—most of the mutants she knew either tolerated their abilities or outright despised them.
Take Hank, for example. One genius b accident away from being turned into a walking science fair project.
Big, blue, and fuzzy. He tried to act like he was okay with it, quoting Shakespeare with a straight face, but Jean had heard the thoughts he didn't say.
He missed being able to fit into a restaurant booth.
Scott couldn't even open his eyes without risking mass mansughter. Lived his life like a budget Cyclops—pun intended—seeing the world through blood-red filters.
Warren? Rich, gorgeous, and cursed with wings that made him look like he fell out of a Renaissance painting during a bad acid trip.
Sure, he could fly, but that didn't exactly help when trying to attend a board meeting with his father's corporate cronies. Kind of hard to wear a suit when your scapus are weaponized.
And then there was Jean herself.
No physical mutations to speak of. No monstrous transformations or wings or cws.
Just the constant, mind-shredding static of every thought, fear, and secret within a certain radius. A walking, talking antenna for humanity's collective anxiety.
She sighed and looked at He. The woman was hovering zily in mid-air, a picture of smug supernatural indifference, like a gothic wn ornament that refused to obey gravity or social etiquette.
"It's not that we don't accept our powers," Jean said, crossing her arms, "it's that they're… inconvenient. In daily life. Sometimes even dangerous."
She frowned harder. "Seriously, if you were in our pce, what would you do?"
He tilted her head and gave her a look that was equal parts amusement and mockery. "Good question," she said with a devilish grin. "But unfortunately, I don't know. Probably use my powers to control people and become president. I mean, that is the supreme ruler of Earth, right?"
Jean stared at her. There was a beat of silence.
She sighed again, deeper this time, dragging her hands down her face like she regretted every life choice that had brought her to this conversation. "Why do I even bother asking you serious questions…"
He chuckled, still floating.
"Okay, okay," she said, raising her hands in mock surrender. "Maybe that was too much. You're clearly trying to have a heartfelt therapy moment, and I'm here treating it like some joke."
She suddenly looked far more serious than usual—well, retively. For He, seriousness was a slight drop in sarcasm levels.
"Look, dear," she began, voice smoothing out like velvet over a bde, "let me put it this way. Mutant powers come from a sort of genetic mutation. I won't bore you with the cosmic details right now—though, spoiler alert: it's cooler than you think—but for simplicity's sake, let's call it the X-Gene."
Jean never expected that just like that, He would start talking about some hard secrets to her. She had always suspected that He might know the origin but never dared to ask. Now, He had all her attention.
"Now, the first humans to have this little gem of a gene," He continued, circling Jean like a predatory professor, "existed roughly a million years ago. A bit hard to get b samples, of course, what with them being dust and all, but trust me, they were there."
She paused and grinned. "That gene? It was dormant."
"Then, somewhere around 17,000 years ago—give or take a century or three—people started manifesting it. Conditions were met, cosmic dice were rolled, and poof: mutants."
He waved her fingers for effect, mimicking a cheesy magic trick. Jean rolled her eyes.
"And now?" He went on, fingers steepled dramatically. "Now that humanity's had time to stew in pollution, microwaves, stress, and existential dread, that little gene is practically everywhere. Dormant in most, but still there. Waiting."
She floated in close to Jean's face, her voice dropping to a whisper. "Almost anyone can become a mutant now. All it takes is the right cocktail of misery and bad luck. Emo depression, gamma ray showers, a hearty dose of radiation—pick your poison."
Jean stared at her. "So… you're saying we're all just one trauma away from evolving?"
"Exactly!" He beamed like a game show host. "Isn't that just delightfully grim? Evolution powered by suffering. That Darwin man you've been expining would've thrown up in his beard."
Jean rubbed her temples. Apparently, her worldview seemed to have been affected. "You have the worst way of expining things."
He just gave a devilish wink, then added, "But back to your problem… Yeah, your powers suck in the 'getting a normal job' department."
"But you're also walking nuclear weapons with anxiety issues. The world should really be more worried about you than the other way around."
Jean grimaced. "That's not comforting."
"I'm not here to comfort," He said, now floating upside down, her hair trailing like ink in water. "I'm here to remind you that you could kill all those causing problems for you with a thought and conquer the others ruling them—and here you are, enduring all kinds of suffering."
"Maybe mutants are masochists?" murmured He, knowing Jean would hear it—which the tter did, before just smiling helplessly.
He didn't see the reaction she expected from Jean and was disappointed. Truly speaking, she had hoped that Jean would talk about how to use this information to her advantage and help mutants as a whole. But nah, the tter was just there, doubting her life.
This is the problem with most mutants. It's almost as if they don't really want to solve the problem.
...
...
...
It had been three days since Magneto strolled into Cape Citadel like he was redecorating the pce for a housewarming party—only with less cake and more magnetic carnage.
And today? Today was the big day.
Three days ago, he'd issued an ultimatum to the world's governments.
A real straightforward one, too: 'Recognize mutantkind or prepare to be very, very sorry.'
Naturally, the U.S. government responded with all the tact and wisdom of a drunk raccoon in a trash can. (AN: don't have grudge against raccoon.)
Instead of negotiating, they sent a crack team of 'diplomats'—which is a generous term for what were clearly spies with the subtlety of a marching band in a library.
They poked around, got caught trying to pce bugs, and one of them even tried to flirt with Mystique.
He didn't survive the embarrassment. Or the throwing knife. Honestly, Magneto couldn't even tell which one finished him off.
Anyway, he was done pying nice.
If they thought he was bluffing, well… surprise, motherf***ers.
A day ago, he gave the world one final warning: acknowledge mutants as a sovereign people with rights, or he'd start taking matters into his own gloved, dramatically gesturing hands.
Now the 24 hours were up.
He gnced sideways at Mystique, who was perched at a control panel with the casual grace of someone who could kill everyone in the room using only a paperclip and a bad attitude.
"Do it," he said. "Hijack the airwaves. Time for show-and-tell."
Mystique didn't even blink.
With a few keystrokes, she broke through more firewalls than a teenage hacker on a Mountain Dew bender.
Within seconds, every major broadcast channel in the U.S. began to flicker. CNN, FOX, ABC—hell, even the Weather Channel got booted from its usual loop of hurricanes and disappointed forecasters.
The screen steadied, cutting to a single image: Magneto standing tall, looking like the world's most dangerous motivational speaker in a helmet that probably got more radio signal than the White House.
"Governments of the world. Leaders who've ignored us. People who pretend mutant suffering is just a some kind of joke—today, you watch," he said, voice calm and theatrical, like he'd been practicing in the mirror (spoiler: he had). "You had your chance. You had plenty of chances."
He took a slow breath—mostly for dramatic effect—and extended a hand. Behind him, a glowing holographic map of the United States appeared.
Several red dots showed like warning lights on a nuclear bingo card. One in particur—bright and angry in the Nevada desert—lit up like a Christmas tree in hell.
"This," Magneto said, gesturing toward the glowing spot, "is one of your 'top-secret' military bases. It's where you hide the mutants you can't control. Where you poke, prod, and slice them like experimental rats."
The feed switched to live footage. At first, it was grainy—standard security cam stuff.
But then the quality sharpened to show what looked like the opening act to a disaster movie. Metal doors were being ripped off their hinges. Arms howled. Guards ran around in circles like headless chickens, only less effective.
The feed switched again—this time to a drone shot from above. Several sleek metallic shapes descended from the sky. They looked like missiles, but they weren't. Not really.
"Let this be your education," Magneto said, almost kindly. "Let this be the lesson you refused to learn the polite way."
With a casual flick of his wrist—honestly, he could've been ordering a coffee—the devices nded and triggered in unison.
No fireballs. No craters. Just a pulse of invisible energy that made every piece of tech in the facility give up on life. Lights died.
Turrets drooped. Guns clicked uselessly. A tank even made a sad little whirrrrrk noise before going completely limp. It was, in a word, satisfying.
The camera panned to the containment cells. One by one, the magnetic locks snapped open, freeing dozens of mutants.
Some blinked into the light like they hadn't seen daylight in years. Some colpsed to the floor in shock. A few screamed. A couple immediately bolted. All of them were free.
Back in the control room, Magneto stepped closer to the camera, his voice lower now, colder. More personal.
"This... is restraint," he said. "This is mercy. We could have turned that base into radioactive ash. We didn't. Not yet."
He let that st part hang in the air like a guillotine.
"From today forward, we're done asking for rights we already have. We're not begging for crumbs anymore. We're taking the whole damn table."
And with that, the screen cut to bck. Millions of people stared at their TVs in sck-jawed silence. Some horrified. Some cheering.
One guy in Kansas probably spilled his beer. Several government officials presumably crapped their pants in unison.
Mystique turned from the console, arms crossed. "They're going to lose their minds."
"Good," Magneto said, sounding like he just won a game of interdimensional chess. "Let them panic. The more they scramble, the easier it'll be for us to take control. A crumbling world is fertile ground for revolution."
He turned and strode toward the war room, his crimson cape fring behind him like he practiced that move in the mirror too. (Spoiler: he had.)
Behind him, the base buzzed to life. Phase two was about to begin—and this time, there'd be less talking and more screaming.
After all, nothing says 'take us seriously' like a good old-fashioned existential crisis on live TV.
END OF THE CHAPTER
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Because This Matters to Someone, Probably
Magneto didn't actually reach out and magnetically punch Nevada from Cape Citadel. That's not how physics—or something he can do with his current level. Instead:
Mystique and the Brotherhood had pnted EMP devices near the base days in advance, before he even invaded the Cape Citadel, this is a pn they have crafted for months.
Magneto's power triggered those devices remotely via satellite rey and high-altitude drones designed to carry and amplify magnetic pulses.
The facility's electronics weren't just fried—they were systematically dismantled, as if their own systems betrayed them.
