| Higher Ground |
[Aug. 30th, 2008|03:02 pm] |
Premise
The rumors - dismissed as myths, urban legend – had circulated for years. There was a kid from Spokane who could melt metal with a touch, someone's cousin's neighbor's aunt had gone to school with a girl with blue skin… Everyone had heard about the mutants but no-one much took the notion of them seriously; they were a boogy man story kids told at camp, nothing more.
It all changed in September of 1989 when a noted geneticist publicly revealed the discovery of something called the 'x-gene', a characteristic shared by certain prison inmates whose crimes had never been completely explicable. One of these, Manuel Alfonzo Rodrigo de la Rocha, had long since been speculated to have some empathic ability. The news had gone public on the 17th.
De la Rocha was dead by the 20th.
World
The 'outing' of the mutants caused immediate wide-scale paranoia, periods of quiet marked by outbursts of violence, neighbor turning on neighbor, people who looked even a little different from the norm getting accused of all kinds of things. There were beatings, there were hate campaigns and, though rarer, there were lynchings. As things got worse two very old friends – Erik Lehnsherr and Charles Xavier – decided to make a stand. Both found their way into government – Erik in San Francisco, ultimately taking the mayoral post, and Charles getting into Homeland Security. For a decade they quietly sought out other mutants, working behind the scenes to get enough of them into position so that, should the time come, they'd be ready.
The election of November 2000 signaled the time was coming and, as the government vetoed one mutant-protection law after another, ratifying one mutant control law after another, Charles and Erik made the final preparations. Charles would be the silent partner, officially and publicly opposed to a plan he'd helped action, and Erik would be the face of the movement.
The movement that on July 4th 2003, using a team of just fifty, used Erik's position, Charles' money and a whole group of people's gifts to take complete and total control of California. The sealed the borders, took over the state government computers and locked down, spilling as little blood as possible as they forcibly evicted the human population, letting only 2% remain and even then only after the team – which would come to be known as The Brotherhood of X-Men – had it's telepaths check them over.
It took time for the US to accept that the situation wasn't going to change – each move they made on California was met by a swift and devastating counter attack, all clearly pre-planned well ahead of time. Officially, legally, the state is still one of the fifty but the US provides it with no goods, services or anything else for that matter and receives nothing in return. While the situation is officially unresolved most now choose to quietly ignore it, happy to let the mutants get on with their lives so long as they're getting on with them somewhere else.
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