Once she gave her yes, Hank laid out exactly what the trip involved.
They were headed to Poland to see an old friend of the Professor’s.
Word had reached them that someone meant the man harm.
After weighing the options, the Professor had decided to stay and hold down Xavier’s School himself, in case anyone tried to seize the moment to raid the school and abduct the young mutants there.
The rescue, then, would fall to Jean Grey and Cyclops.
Mutants with overwhelming offensive power were hardly in short supply, but in the strict sense the team had always been thin on anyone who could fill a “healer” role—one need only recall that Hank had been pulling double duty as the school physician.
Given all that, inviting Angela along made perfect sense; it would also give both sides a chance to see what the other could do.
In the end, four of them set out—two fewer than the lineup Angela was most used to, though that was no great matter.
By Hank’s account, “Phoenix,” Jean Grey, had a gift for telepathy that outstripped even Professor X’s, though it had yet to be fully drawn out.
“Cyclops,” Scott Summers, was the current field leader of the X-Men; his eyes could unleash beams of devastating energy, placing his combat power among the very top tier of mutants.
To keep those eyes in check, he wore glasses made from a special material at all times.
Angela nodded along, taking it all in.
Oh, so they had both an ADC and an APC.
Plenty of physical output and plenty of magic output, and with Dr. McCoy able to turn into the “Beast” and stand in as a makeshift tank in a pinch, plus her own healing on top, the team could just about be called complete.
Granted, energy shockwaves fired from a pair of eyes sounded plenty magical, but she’d file it under physical damage for now—laser light was a physical phenomenon, after all.
When there was real work to be done, Angela moved quickly and efficiently.
She quickly filed for leave (today was, after all, her very first day as school physician), packed some rations and water into her system storage, and got ready to meet the others at the school gate.
That was when she ran into a problem—not a big one, but not nothing, either.
Hank had mentioned the mission might not call for any fighting.
There was a chance that by the time they arrived the military still wouldn’t have made its move, and all they’d need to do was talk Magneto into coming back to the States. Follow the newest chapters on NovelPing.
In that case, showing up in full combat gear would draw far too many eyes.
But aside from that combat suit, the only thing she owned that looked halfway normal was her white coat; the rest of her wardrobe—her skins—would only invite bigger misunderstandings.
The Witch and the Succubus, for instance, were a good ten times more conspicuous than even the sci-fi look of the combat suit.
After a moment’s thought, Angela swallowed her pride and went off to find Jean Grey, her fellow traveler, to borrow some everyday clothes.
Jean cheerfully dug out a shirt and trousers along with a double-breasted wool coat.
That small hiccup closed the distance between the two women in record time, carrying them from strangers to something like friends.
What they called each other shifted just as fast—from the stiff “Dr. Ziegler” and “Ms. Grey” to a simple “Angela” and “Jean”—which left the two men along for the ride utterly bewildered, with no grasp whatsoever of how conversations between women actually worked.
Naturally, Jean wasn’t about to mention that part of the reason was that, the whole time, Angela Ziegler had been silently marveling at how pretty she was.
On the private jet, Hank took the controls, Cyclops sat with his eyes closed, resting, and Jean Grey filled Angela in on the whole story behind the mission.
“Angela, do you know who Magneto is? He’s an extraordinarily powerful mutant. He once helped the Professor found the X-Men, but later, for all sorts of reasons, the two of them parted ways. A few years ago he tried to assassinate the President; after he failed, he went into hiding. The Professor has always hoped he’d come back, but he’s never answered. Recently the Professor noticed some strange activity from the military—they may have picked up his trail. Given the military’s track record of using mutants as test subjects, the Professor is worried Magneto could be in danger, so he sent us to lend a hand.”
It was a clean, clear account, and a fairly even-handed one—enough that even someone who knew nothing going in could come away with the gist of it.
“I see.”
Angela nodded, while a thought ran quietly through her mind: now why does that sound familiar?
If Charles Xavier was a bit like Morrison, then this business with Magneto was practically a remake of the Reyes situation.
Old friends, once.
Together in the same organization, once.
And then the parting of ways.
Hmm—with any luck, the Magneto here wouldn’t go the way Reyes had and turn into a “Reaper,” hunting down his former comrades one by one.
It was then that Cyclops suddenly broke into the conversation.
“That guy Magneto…
The things he’s pulled over the years—”
“Scott.” Jean Grey spoke his name, and a look from her cut him off before he could go on.
“The Professor told us this isn’t the time to be settling old scores.
Mutants helping one another—that’s something we have to do.”
“…Hmph.” Scott Summers shut his mouth, none too willingly.
If anyone but Jean had been the one to talk him down, he wouldn’t have stopped.
The trouble Magneto had brought down on them, the messes that the Brotherhood of Mutants had stirred up—just counting the times the X-Men and the Brotherhood had come to blows, the number ran well into the double digits.
And then Magneto up and went into hiding on a whim, abandoning all those Brotherhood members, leaving the Professor to clean up the wreckage in the end.
No, he didn’t believe for a second that a man like Magneto had “turned over a new leaf.”
Watching the delicate something in the air between these two, Angela couldn’t shake the feeling she’d caught a whiff of something sweet brewing between them.
She couldn’t help leaning toward Hank, up front at the controls.
“Dr. McCoy, I can’t help feeling the two of us have been cast as third wheels here—the kind who get kicked to death by a horse for it?”
Hank went blank for a second before it clicked that she meant the old saying about people who get in the way of someone else’s romance.
He chuckled low under his breath.
“Oh, Dr. Ziegler, I don’t think there’s any danger of that. Jean is far too gracious a lady.”
Teased and complimented in the same breath, Jean Grey only laughed, perfectly at ease, not the least bit flustered.
Scott, trusting that no one could read his eyes behind the glasses, quietly rolled them.
“Come off it.
You’re just trying to say I’m the bad-tempered horse, aren’t you?
Hank, you joined the X-Men even earlier than I did.
Don’t tell me you don’t know exactly what kind of man Magneto is.”
The “Beast” had been among the very first X-Men, which did make him far more familiar with “Magneto” than the later arrivals, “Cyclops” and “Phoenix”—familiar with that era when Professor X and Magneto had worked together as the closest of partners.
Hank was quiet for a while before he answered.
“Magneto isn’t a bad man.
It’s only that, sometimes, his ideals and ours don’t line up.”
Angela asked, curious, “I think I have a rough sense of Charles’s ideals by now.
So what are Magneto’s?”