Villain Mastermind

Once upon a time, there was a villain with a very peculiar power.

His name was Jason Wyngarde, though the world knew him as Mastermind, and he could make people see things that were not there. Not blurry, not vague — perfectly, completely, convincingly real. A locked door where there was only a wall. A vast storm in a clear blue sky. A face instead of a stranger's face. Whatever Mastermind imagined, he could make you see it, and you would never know the difference.

For a long time, Mastermind used this power to make mischief and gain advantages for himself, always from a safe distance, always very pleased with his own cleverness. But then he decided to test himself against the best — and the best, he had decided, was Jean Grey.

It started quietly. Just a flicker, like a candle glimpsed around a corner. Jean would walk down a hallway at the Xavier Institute and the far end would look a little longer than usual, a little dimmer. She blinked and it was gone. She went back to her book. She went back to her training.

But the flickers kept coming.

A shadow in the wrong place. A window that opened onto a view she didn't recognize. Her own reflection in a mirror that seemed to look back just a half second too late.

Professor Xavier noticed the way Jean's eyes went distant sometimes, the way she paused mid-sentence. He had seen enough to know a troubled mind from a merely tired one. He called the X-Men together and explained what he suspected — that someone was sending illusions into Jean's thoughts, carefully, like a letter slipped under a door.

Scott Summers didn't wait to hear more. He was already at the door.

The X-Men found Mastermind in Manhattan, where he had set his grandest trick: a maze built entirely of illusions, mirror after mirror after mirror, all of them showing Jean her own reflection and nothing else. She could hear Scott's voice calling her name, but every direction she turned, every way she reached, there was only her own face looking back.

Mastermind watched from just outside the illusion, hidden in a doorway, very satisfied with himself.

Jean stood still in the center of the maze.

She breathed slowly. She closed her eyes.

She thought: I cannot see through this lie with my eyes. But I am a telepath. I don't need my eyes.

She reached out with her mind the way Professor Xavier had taught her — gently, carefully, one thing at a time. She felt Scott first, warm and steady as a lighthouse, calling her name. She felt the city around her: a thousand small pulses of thought and feeling, all of them real.

And then she felt something different. Something thin and taut and coiled very tight — the concentration of a mind holding too many things in place at once. She followed that thread the way you follow a string through a dark room.

At the other end of the thread: Mastermind.

Jean took a breath. She gave that thread the gentlest push she could manage — not angry, just firm, the way you set down something heavy you've been carrying too long.

SNAP.

Every mirror shattered. Every shadow dissolved. Every false hallway and false door and false reflection vanished all at once, like a soap bubble popping in the afternoon sun.

Mastermind stumbled backward into a very real wall with a very real THUD. He blinked at Jean standing in the sunlight of Midtown Manhattan, entirely free of his maze, entirely calm.

He had never been beaten like that before. Not from the inside. He turned and ran before she could say a single word.

Scott was beside her in an instant. "Are you all right?"

Jean looked up at the open blue sky overhead — real sky, real light, no illusions anywhere.

"I am now," she said.

Later, back at the Xavier Institute, Professor Xavier told her that what she had done was remarkable. She had not fought the illusion — she had simply reached past it to the truth.

Jean thought about that for a while. Then she smiled.

It turned out that finding what was real, even when everything around you looked false, was a skill that would serve her for the rest of her life.

Sleep tight. The world looks just like itself tonight.