[color=ffff00][b]Forward Research Bunker 'Quito'[/b]
[i]Andean Foothills, Ecuador[/i][/color]

[color=gray]The low hum of servers droned in the black void of the back shadows of the space. He had been reduced to a shadow among the shadows; the pants they provided him were black, the top matched in color with a basic v-neck cotton tee design. He wiggled his toes inside the grey pair of New Balance sneakers. At first, they had been jailers, even if they were some of the most polite and courteous jailers he could have lucked into. He was never threatened, other than the simple fact he wasn't allowed to leave.

Not yet, anyway, they told him. 

In a conference room with a metal table, metal chairs with white cushions, and metal paneled walls, Donald Trask told him the truth: he wasn't anything like his uncle Boliver. Donald was smart, but he wasn't Boliver. He'd heard the tale before; Tony Stark had been the one to conceive of the Sentinel program. In his haste and his multi-tasking glory, Stark had handed the project off to the rising star technical mind in Stark's company: Boliver Trask. Donald wasn't sure if Mr. Stark had understood the kind of man that Boliver was, but the Trask family knew. 

To the beautiful woman who had lured him, now with pinned up hair and wearing what looked like a tactical uniform with no insignia, he came clean. To the man who he had seen in the hotel suite wearing the exact same thing the woman had, and the dirty blonde square shaped woman in the glasses with the white lab coat and khakis on, all three on the other end of the conference room table, Donald spilled it all. 

Boliver was a brilliant man, but he could be something of a jerk. It wasn't evil that brought Boliver to the place in history he would eventually inhabit, it was love: it was a father's love for his son. Donald's cousin, Larry, had been born a mutant. So was Tanya, Boliver's daughter. Few knew, outside who Donald had to assume had been the X-Men, or whoever the mutants not on the Avengers-like team of mutants were called. Somewhere, Donald had to admit, Boliver went from love to hatred. His daughter was lost to mystery, his son killed by the very things Boliver created. 

Donald did what he could to live a normal life and forget it. He was just grateful he hadn't been born a mutant. When he was younger, he admitted to the trio seated at the table, he had wished he had been born with mutant powers. Who didn't want to be superpowered? The older he got, the more he realized mutants like the X-Men were rare: most mutants were closer to freak shows than they were superpowered. And the odds of being born a superpowered mutant was about the same odds as achieving superpower through science, like the Avengers, or being an alien, like the Justice League. 

But, Donald told them, he didn't hate mutants. When they asked if he thought they hated mutants, Donald couldn't help but nod. He did. The woman in the lab coat chuckled, while the man explained: they didn't hate mutants. Their organization didn't hate mutants by its nature. It wasn't anti-mutant, it was simply pro-human. Donald had said it best; when most of the world doesn't have superpowers but those with superpowers are growing in number...what was to happen? Governments had made laws regarding limitations and registration, but none of them had ever had the desired effect. It was a more pressing crisis than climate change. At least with climate change there was some kind of answer, some semblance of hope. 

Based on the math alone, within their lifetimes mutants would displace humans on the planet Earth as the dominant species. 

Donald had understood their points, who didn't? But he wasn't quite certain a shadowy organization was something he could support. Then Alice, the pretty woman, had asked him to give them a day and let them show him everything they had. If he didn't want to help them, after that, they'd just let him go. He believed them. The evening was spent playing chess with the woman in the lab coat, the four of them had a nice dinner of steak and salad. Alice and he talked late into the evening, and when he asked her what to expect from the next day, she simply told him honesty is what he'd get. Complete honesty. 

In the dark lab with the servers the next morning, he waited. When Alice finally arrived, she was smiling. "Do you need anything?"

Donald shook his head, "No," there was a moment's hesitation before he looked from the gray floor and back up to her face, "I honestly just want to get started." 

"Yeah, I can understand that."

"So, uh," his small dark eyes set back into his thick cheeked face looked back and forth, "where are we headed?"

Alice's smile never waivered, "When you're done, we'll be right outside the door."

"Oh, um...okay, yeah."

It was a little over half an hour before the stale recycled air of the hidden facility stirred as Donald emerged from the shadowy lab. His eyes wide, his posture changed with his back straight and his shoulders back. In the doorway he stared at the three of them, his voice full of conviction where before there had been uncertainty. "I'm not sure I understood all of it, but...I understood enough of what was shown to me. You all have to do something. You HAVE to do something, and you have to do it now. And I guess...I guess my only question now is...what do you need from me? Say it, and it's yours."

[center][color=gray] ———  [color=ffff00]⭙[/color]  ———[/color][/center]

[color=ffff00][b]Eastmont Plantation[/b]
[i]Unincorporated Genosha[/i][/color]

When he awoke half-way through the night, the world seemed oddly quiet. There was the distant noise of waves thundering hundreds of feet below the cliff in which the old building was perched. There was occasional sound from the heavy forest that bordered the property. More immediate to his bedroom, there was the crackle of a small fire in the fireplace. Yet somehow the world seemed to be holding it's breath, and leaving Charles Xavier uneasy. He returned to sleep staring at the Cerebra helmet on the bedside table. 

When morning came, and he stirred, the air smelling of seabreeze and dust and years. The building was a pre-fabrication built around an older structure; a colonial plantation from the days of the British Empire. The fields of the plantation had long ago been reclaimed by the wilds of Genosha, but the structure was updated with it's prefabrication exoskeleton due to the caves below. It was there that Charles had truly set up shop, in a lab that was once used to torture and experiment on mutants. There was a satisfaction that the subterranean structure was the place where the newest version of Cerebra was born, the secret lab now expanded and built upon, a mix of high technology, alien technology, and what Forge was beginning to simply call, "organic technology." 

It was there the six of them met, waiting on the seventh. It was young Douglas Ramsey who began, his face scruffy with a blonde beard, the result of months away. Forge, Sage, Beast, Trinary, and Black Tom had already been there when the steel caged elevator brought Charles down to the lab. Tom looked something like a gangster pirate. The rest of them wore variations of X-team uniforms. On a whiteboard was a badly drawn tree, with five roots. "Morning, Professor. I was about to get into the systems we've set up."

Charles bid them wait but a few more moments. In the far background of the subterranean level an opening in the face of the cliff, showing the horizon of the Indian ocean from the middle heights of the Genoshan cliff. Their last attendant flew in gracefully, landing softly close to their group, his eyes carefully inspecting new additions to the lab.

"Organic tech, I'm calling it," Forge announced to Magneto. 

Charles walked closer to the group, his eyes on Erik. "Douglas was about to debrief us."

And so he did; the four systems in place: Transit and Monitoring, it was agreed Sage was the natural selection for this. After some discussion between Douglas, Sage, and Forge, the mutant with the machine of a mind nodded her agreement, finally. Defense and Observation was a proposal for Black Tom. The man agreed, instantly, before it was even fully explained by Douglas and Forge. Secondary and External Systems would be left to Trinary, given her unique abilities. Hank would provide an Overwatch role, using his experience and various specialties as catch-all for the other three systems. The fifth root was simply marked in red, with a phrase in quotations: "Skunkworks." 

This, Forge explained himself, would be his area. Douglas chimed in at the end to emphasis how much progress, and how fast, Forge had made during his short time joining him on the island. 

"Thank you," Charles said after a moment's silence, one arm crossed over the chest of his cotton button-up, the other rubbing his smooth chin. "Please, Cypher and Forge, take the day to rest and refresh. Trinary, Hank, Tom, please enjoy the breakfast spread in the dining room above." It was said with the tone of a professor dismissing class. Where fluorescent light met natural rays from the cave opening mid-cliff, the two men stood, regarding the white board.

In his way, Charles simply leaned over, and got on with it casually, "Your daughter is on the island." There was a pause, before he remembered to specify, "Lorna. Bobby Drake is escorting her. Apparently Genosha has had a rash of attacks on defense infrastructure, terrorism from the reports, I've tasked Bobby with investigating it, assuming she would join him in the effort—I appear to have been correct in that assumption."

“She is free to be, as are all Mutants.” It wasn't a surprise that muted Eric’s tone, not that he had known, but trepidation, his eyes following the backs of those dismissed out the door, disappearing the moment before Charles’ spoke. “Perhaps if I had your gift, old friend, instead of my own, my daughters would be less burdened with the errors of my ways. But perhaps that is optimistic of me. I will speak with her when she is ready to do so, I am sure she needs little aid from me to help Master Drake.” 

With blue eyes that found themselves staring into the whiteboard scrawled with the black inked marker handwriting of Douglas Ramsey, Charles Xavier found himself unable to keep his mind away from thoughts rumbling like a distant storm in the back of his mind as the suggestion that his old friend would in any better standing with his children should they had swapped gifts, the face and bitter tone of his son a flashpoint for regret Charles did what he could not to focus on. “Between us, I think your relationship with your biological children may be better.”

Erik did not sit, instead his focus resumed on the white board, assessing what he had heard, and what he could still see. “Ambitious, but then, neither of us would be here if we were not. Another great project from the mind of Xavier, although perhaps one day you will not talk to them as if you are still Headmaster.” It  was not a particularly subtle deflection via jest, but speaking of one daughter brought up thoughts of another, and when speaking with Charles, thoughts were simply another medium of verse. “Have you yet spoken with Miss Frost?”

The comment about the Headmaster’s tone brought Charles’ blue eyes slowly from the board to the taller man. Charles kept any proper retort to his own thoughts, instead sighing into the subject of Emma Frost. “Yes. I delivered her the Cerebra helmet. She called it ugly,” Charles admitted, as he chuckled in amusement. “We will need to tell her, and soon. I have laid the groundwork I could with my own business firm investments, but she saw through them as easily as we telepaths see through a simple mind. If the woman has an Omega-level talent, it’s the ruthless world of capitalism—and she has truly mastered it. If we’re going to do this in a way that’s different from how you established Genosha, if we’re going to really achieve what we must for all mutant-kind, we will need to lean on her. Have you given any thought to how we approach Sinister?”

“It is unfortunate we even have to consider doing so.” The distaste was evident in Erik’s tone, although whether this was at the thought of Sinister himself or the matter of fact manner that Charles took in regards to dealing with him, was unclear. Perhaps both. He deflected for the moment, as before responding to a less serious aspect of their conversation. “Perhaps we should listen to her, appearances are important, at least we wouldn’t want her to hesitate in wearing it, should the need arise.” He was evidently joking, a tease towards the individual not present. “We should, perhaps later today, when we are done dealing with the Americans. They’ve been speaking with Scott, but that didn’t stop them parking an arsenal capable of eradicating this entire coast of Africa, let alone Genosha, nearby while they did so.” It was almost as bad as the old days, the near world ending conflicts which had dominated the early period of when the world became aware of mutants. The conflicts had never really ended, they’d just gone underground. Or underwater, in this case.

“We will need to offer something to Sinister that he wants, but doesn’t feel he can simply take. An ever smaller list, to his mind, I have no doubt, and it will need to be balanced against what the others will allow, no matter how much you tell them it is for their own good. Some are more heroic than us, in that matter.”

“Agreed,” Charles gave a half shrug as he stared, either at the white board, or past it into his own internal thoughts, “We bring Emma in today or tomorrow, schedules allowing.” [i]She is a member of the X-Men, and they have a habit of becoming unavailable when something comes up. And something always comes up[/i], he finished the thought to himself, sparing Erik the melodrama of the X-Men-centric thinking. 

His bald head turned at the distaste of Sinister, the thoughts of one of those former X-Men echoing in his mind: [i]Trust him, Charles, and we will all burn.[/i] “We will have to offer him a seat at the table. Hard as it is to swallow, I find I feel best about Mr. Essex when he’s in view; it’s when he’s off in the shadows and lurking about in labs that I feel most anxious about him. That said, he was very willing with our test case” Charles readjusted the weight of his body from one foot to the other as he released a soft sigh from the very pain that the knowledge and experience of Essex had cost him. “They’re ready, by the way. I haven’t told anyone else, yet. The only ones that know are them, themselves, and Douglas; and you, now…and Gerard, of course. He’s aware of all the risks. I’ll handle the killing.”

As far as Charles was concerned, the less said about it all, the better—for now anyway.
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