Who: Theresa Rourke (Narrative) When: About four years ago Where: San Francisco, CA What: Gettin' ready to rob the Mint, before she is caught and taken to Xavier's.
Theresa Rourke stared up at the imposing silhouette of the San Francisco Mint, feeling a little out of place. She should be excited, adrenaline-filled; her uncle had been planning this heist for months, possibly ever since they’d moved to California. They had the best chance with a small but powerful team, Uncle Tom had said. The final team was Tom, Juggernaut, and herself. She had been so flattered that he thought of her that way, and this time, he was giving her more responsibility than in the petty robberies they had committed before; banks, jewelry stores, museums...all were practice runs compared to this.
Her job was actually fairly simple. She had been practicing for months to be able to break locks efficiently and quietly using her voice, and she was confident she would be able to get the vault doors open. Tom and Juggernaut would do most of the actual theft; she was their entry and their lookout, since it would be easy for her to send up a warning in an instant. Part of her mind rebelled against what they were doing- this is ILLEGAL! Someone could get hurt!-but she pushed the doubts to the back of her mind. Uncle Tom had said she’d like being rich. And she owed him this much.
He may be a criminal, she reflected, but he was also the best man she knew. She didn’t think anyone else would have taken her in after her mother was killed. Uncle Tom had taken her under his wing, given her an education, taught her how to control her powers and treated her like his own daughter. Sometimes, she secretly wished she was. Uncle Tom told her about her real father after she found pictures of a smiling redheaded man with her mother and asked who he was.
“That’s yuir da, Sean, me cousin,” he’d said, and his glare at the picture had surprised her just as much as his words had. “He left her—yuir ma— while she was still pregnant with ye. How anyone could leave a girl like that, I didnae know.”
She owed him everything, even if he was a criminal. Even if he was training her to be a criminal too, and she knew he was. If he ever needed help, she would be there, no matter what it was.
They rushed the Mint and she started screaming, and two thousand miles away, a machine designed to detect mutants picked it up.