Who: Hank McCoy and YOU. What: The ape-man cometh. Where: The park! You know the one. When: NOW. Rating: Absolutely none.
For a man of science, psychology was always something of a mystery. Hank McCoy could recite the stages of physical recovery from various injuries verbatim, with his eyes closed, while modifying the Blackbird, hanging from one foot, while upside down. He could do even better with the stages of mechanical repair or recovering a corrupted computer code. Mental recovery, though? He was as in the dark as the next guy, and for a genius with a crippling inferiority complex, just admitting that to himself was difficult. Normally he wouldn’t even have bothered thinking about it, but after the deep toll that Weapon X had taken on all of them, Hank felt like he needed to try and understand how his friends were coping. Not because he was concerned about them, because while they were absolutely his best friends they were all coping fine. No, he was concerned about himself. He wasn’t coping well with the changes he had been forced to undergo. Not the mental ones, because though he did now know quite a bit more about infiltration and assassination than he ever wanted to, he hadn’t really had to put any of the latter to use so really, he’d had to change very little mentally. Physically, though. Physically, he was the most changed out of all of them. While he’d never been able to pass for human, he at least could pass himself off as a fat guy if people didn’t pay too much attention to him. That was before Weapon X got their hands on him, before the horrible bio-tech and genetic experiments changed him even more into a beast than he already had been. Now there was no way for him to pass for human, no way to put on his specially tailored clothes and keep his head down and maybe pass for human. Now he was a blue, furry freak with an animalistic snout, claws, and fangs. He was a freak among freaks now, and he knew it. So did the others, even if they were too polite to say anything openly. It didn’t help things at all that the others were moving on so well, though Hank couldn’t blame them. All their changes were mental, psychological. They could still get dressed up and go out, or even do something as simple as look in a mirror or look down at themselves and not be instantly reminded of the horrors of the Weapon X program and their genetic Dr. Moreaus. Hank didn’t have that option anymore.
It was why his current “project” kept him so isolated. The others thought it was just one of his little programming binges, but that was far from the truth. The truth was he was grasping for purchase in a life that was more and more feeling like it was slipping away. More often than he wanted to lately, he felt like he was falling down a cliff without any handhold to grab onto, and now that he was a freak among freaks, he felt more alone in that chasm than ever. So instead of joining Cyclops on one of his little thrill-seeking adventures with underprivileged kids, or Wolverine in his automotive work, or even his girlfriend Ororo on her trips to drought-ridden farming communities, he exiled himself down in the school lab, where he could use the excuse of developing a solution to the dependence on expensive pharmaceuticals in third world countries – already done and ready to implement, but he was stalling – to cover for lurking in mutant-friendly chatrooms in the hopes of meeting other mutants. That and, thanks to a simple set of subroutines implanted in the school security system, watching his friends on little windows on his own personal souped-up laptop. From the cameras and secret spying, he was hoping to find some key to his own recovery, some secret that his friends knew that he could implement to make himself feel better, and from the chatrooms…from the chatrooms he wanted something much more primal. He hadn’t exactly been popular before this forced transformation, and now he was even less so. From the chatrooms he was looking for attention, for love, for all the things he’d never gotten from the people he was supposed to get it from. He needed it, craved that validation in the same way that a heroin fiend craved a fix, and someone in these chats – a girl named Mutantchick, a secret mutant supermodel who was secretly a geek at heart – had finally started giving him his fix. It was dark and shameful and pathetic and he knew that, and on his better days he would swear to himself that he would stop going there, but in the dead of night he would always be crawling back to his digitized dealer.
It was where he was going when the world went crazy. One minute he was turning a corner in the mansion as moonlight peaked in through a window, and the next he was standing in a park in broad daylight. Anyone else might have had to prioritize the thoughts that ran through their head right then, but Hank’s intellect being at the level it was, he was able to process them all simultaneously. One thought, however, very quickly overtook the others: I’M STANDING IN A PARK IN A SLEEVELESS SHIRT AND SHORTS. Without so much as another thought, he bolted for the nearest tree and, with barely a hop for him, flipped up into it and ascended to a point high enough, and thick enough with summer leaves, that it would be hard to see the blue, furry freak hiding in it. If he’d had his uniform on him, he’d have activated the communicator and tried to get a message out to the other X-Men, but he hadn’t. It was obvious to him what had happened. With Nightcrawler still at home in Bavaria, the only possibility was an attack from Mastermind, of the Brotherhood. That meant that he was still definitely in the mansion, even if his senses did tell him that he was exactly where it seemed he was. The one good thing about a Mastermind attack, the one thing that Hank knew he could count on in this illusion, was Mastermind’s presence somewhere within it. He was far too arrogant to simply plant an illusion and stay out of it. He was the stereotypical artist compelled to examine his own handiwork, and if Hank could pick out which of these hapless park visitors wasn’t so hapless, it would be his ticket out of here.
Now he just had to find which one was the wolf in sheep’s clothing…