He emerged from the dark of an alley that night, as he had many nights before. Erik had always been blessed with a flair for dramatic entrances. If God really had laid the burden of his mutant powers on him so that he could mete out justice, then God must also, he thought, be placing him wherever others needed him to manifest a call to answer.
Of course, events had conspired to club Munghwa with a bitter exhortation anyway.
According to the radio that had blared over the sink on the hostel counter that morning, the riots had left twenty-three dead or badly injured. Of those, the majority of injuries were mutants’; the majority of fatalities were humans’. The humans were the ones to start it. They caught wind of a small neighborhood in the slums were mutants had informally begun to congregate—inviting others they noticed to join them tenant by tenant until they filled two, two and a half apartment complexes. Humans who couldn’t move stayed there, and most got along fine, finding some mutants handy for keeping up repair on the apartments when the slumlords wouldn’t. One human tenant had been stalking a young mutant woman for months, however. She grew concerned enough to ask the boys across the hall to do something about it. They had tried to intimidate the man into leaving her alone. The man had responded with a knife, and one broken arm later he’d been given an eviction notice due to excessive complaints.
That should have been the end of the matter, except that the man had promptly gone to a bar and inflated the tale of how he’d broke his arm until the patrons there were convinced there was an anti-human mutant cloister living among them, ready to strike at anyone they found alone and unsuspecting on the streets. When law enforcement refused to respond with more than a cursory search, anti-mutant activists had quickly caught wind of the incident, and fanned it into a march on the apartment complexes. When other mutants and human “allies” heard the news, they too gathered in solidarity to protect the tenants. The result was that two mobs had spent an hour and a half screaming at each other before the inevitable happened and someone threw the first punch.
Somehow, the result was that three mutants were jailed for attempting an anti-human act of terror because they’d displayed powers that could have wiped out all the humans there, just to drive the human mob back. Charles, Charles had his lawyers on the case already. But if the news was any indication, Charles Xaviers’ lawyers only served to convinced the world that: [Mutants seem to be growing into a better resourced, better organized threat with connections that are hard to fully grasp at this stage.] The police were digging up every piece of dirt they could on the mutants in custody. One had some connection to mutant activists and looked fit to be convicted, if only to appease the city that no one would stand for their nightmares coming true-- even if their nightmares had not, in fact, come true.
‘What? You don’t think all Charles’s hopes are enough to put the recent mutant witch hunts right?’
