Villain Mister Sinister

Once upon a time, in the cold tunnels beneath the city of New York, there was a kind of darkness that had nothing to do with the lights going out.

It was the darkness of a plan — a very old, very patient plan — set in motion by a man named Mister Sinister.

His real name had once been Nathaniel Essex, and he had been alive for longer than anyone could comfortably think about. In those many, many years, he had studied genes and mutations and the small, secret codes inside every living thing. He had grown pale and still the way old things sometimes do. He had built laboratories full of quiet machines and quiet notes and quiet certainties. And among his notes — in careful handwriting, in a black leather book — was the name: Summers.

The Summers family. Scott's family.

Sinister had been watching them for a very long time.

On the night this story begins, Cyclops was leading the X-Men through one of their most dangerous training missions when the alarms went off. Not a drill. Real alarms. Outside the Xavier School, enormous metal robots — Sentinels, with blank faces and crushing hands — had appeared in the streets, moving toward them.

Cyclops called out the plan even as the first blast rocked the courtyard. He moved the team smoothly, one decision after another, covering his friends and guiding them through the chaos. The Sentinels were big and loud and strong, but the X-Men were quick and clever, and together they slipped through the robots' attack and down into the tunnels beneath the city — the Morlock Tunnels, dark and smelling of stone and old water.

It was quieter there. Quieter, but not safer.

Men and women came out of the shadows — the Marauders, Sinister's own fighters, moving fast and silent. Cyclops called directions in a steady voice as his teammates scattered and regrouped and scattered again. His optic blasts bounced off the curved tunnel walls in flashes of red light. One by one, the Marauders fell back.

And then the tunnel opened into a laboratory.

It was a large room, cold and white, filled with machines that hummed and blinked in the dark. At the far end, perfectly still, stood Mister Sinister.

He was tall and silver-pale, dressed all in black, with a diamond-shaped mark glowing faintly on his forehead. He did not move. He did not seem surprised. He looked at Scott the way you might look at something you have been expecting for a very long time.

"Scott Summers," he said. His voice was smooth and calm, like deep water. "I have studied you since before you were born. Your optic blasts are quite remarkable. You are quite remarkable."

Scott did not like being called remarkable by someone who had sent robots after his friends.

He reached up, lifted his visor, and fired — a full, sustained optic blast, the most powerful he could produce, blazing red across the laboratory.

Sinister raised one hand. The energy washed over him and vanished, absorbed as easily as a shadow swallowed by a dark room. He smiled. It was not a warm smile.

For just a moment, Scott felt the sting of that — the helplessness of striking with everything you had and watching it disappear. But he had been in enough difficult moments to know: one move not working is not the end of the plan. The plan had a second part.

He had already touched his earpiece. He had already spoken Jean's name.

Jean Grey was around the corner, outside the laboratory door, and she had been listening. She reached out with her mind — her wonderful, careful telekinetic power, as gentle as hands when she chose and as powerful as a wave when she didn't — and she chose the wave.

CRASH.

Mister Sinister flew backward through the wall in a shower of plaster and machine parts, and the X-Men ran. Out through the tunnel, up through the hatch, into the cold winter air above the city. Scott counted his team as they emerged — one, two, three, four — all safe. All there.

Sinister was gone. He always disappeared before you could finish what you started with him.

Back at the Xavier School, the others went to sleep. Scott sat alone in the dark Danger Room, turning everything over in his mind. The robots. The tunnels. The way Sinister had said his name — Scott Summers — as if he'd been saying it for years.

He had been studying the Summers family. But why?

Scott didn't know yet. But he stored the question carefully, the way he stored everything that mattered. He would find the answer. He always did. He was patient, and thorough, and he never, not once, stopped caring about the people he loved.

Somewhere in his notes, Mister Sinister was writing too. But Scott Summers was not just a subject in someone else's story.

He was the leader of the X-Men.

And the story, as it turned out, was his.