First Class

Close your eyes for a moment and picture a mansion.

Not a spooky mansion — a good one. Three stories tall, built of pale grey stone, with wide windows that catch the light in the morning and glow amber at night. It sits on a long rolling lawn outside the town of Westchester, New York, and there are oak trees along the drive so old and wide that two children holding hands couldn't wrap their arms around one trunk. The front gate has the letter X worked into the iron. On a wooden sign by the door, in careful painted letters, it says: Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters.

And in the very deepest room of that mansion — a round chamber beneath the earth, humming with the quiet of many computers — a man named Charles Xavier sat in his wheelchair and put on a silver helmet.

The helmet was called Cerebro. When Xavier wore it, his mind reached out across the entire planet like a gentle hand — touching cities, touching forests, touching crowded apartment buildings and small lonely farmhouses. He was looking for a particular kind of mind. The kind that was different. Special. Afraid. The kind that belonged to a mutant.

Xavier himself was a mutant. He could read thoughts and speak inside other people's heads. He had chosen to use that gift to help.

He found them one by one.

Scott Summers was in a group home in Omaha, Nebraska, keeping his eyes closed as often as possible. He wore special ruby-quartz glasses to contain the optic blasts that fired from his eyes, but he was still frightened. The letter from Professor Xavier arrived on a Tuesday. By Wednesday, Scott was on a bus to Westchester.

Ororo Munroe was in Nairobi, Kenya. She had been born with the ability to feel the sky — the pressure systems, the moisture in the air, the electricity in clouds. When Ororo was happy, gentle breezes followed her. When she was startled, lightning jumped from her fingertips. She had kept all of it secret for years. Xavier's letter found her anyway, and she read it three times before she started packing.

Hank McCoy was in a university laboratory in Connecticut — twenty years old and already the most brilliant biologist anyone there had ever seen. He had enormous hands, enormous feet, a body built differently than everyone around him. He was kind and funny and deeply lonely. Xavier's letter was the first time anyone had called his difference a gift.

Jean Grey was in Annandale-on-Hudson, only a short drive from Westchester. She could move objects without touching them and sometimes heard other people's thoughts flooding in like a radio tuned to every station at once. Xavier's letter gave her family a small, cautious hope.

One by one they arrived at the mansion. One by one, Xavier met them in his warm, book-lined study and said the same thing: "I know what you can do. I know it has been hard. Here, it will be different."

That first week was a little chaotic, if we're being honest.

Scott's glasses slipped at breakfast and he cut a long scorch mark across the kitchen ceiling. He was mortified. Xavier simply handed him a cup of tea and said, "We'll practice."

Ororo had a bad dream on Thursday night, and when she woke up, every window on the east side of the mansion was covered in ice. She found Xavier already in the hallway with a warm blanket and a calm expression. "The ice is quite beautiful, actually," he told her. She laughed despite herself.

Hank spent every free moment in the workshop, taking things apart and building them back better. He couldn't sleep much, and the activity steadied him. By Friday morning the boiler ran quieter than it had in ten years.

Jean kept to herself at first. She wore headphones to muffle the noise of other people's thoughts. But at dinner on the third night, she and Ororo discovered they both loved terrible weather-related jokes, and they laughed so hard Jean accidentally levitated the salt shaker.

On Friday evening, as the last light turned the mansion windows gold, Charles Xavier gathered his four new students in the great hall.

"You are the X-Men," he said. "Named for what makes each of you extraordinary. You will train here, learn here, and grow here. And when the world needs protecting — even the parts of the world that are still afraid of people like us — you will be ready."

It was quiet for a moment.

Then Scott straightened his glasses and nodded. Ororo let out a slow breath, and the candles on the mantle flickered in a warm private breeze. Hank folded his enormous hands in his lap and smiled. Jean listened to the room and heard something she had almost never felt before: belonging.

Outside, an autumn leaf turned three slow circles on the evening air — just because it could.

Goodnight, X-Men. Your story is just beginning.