It’s the book you’ve been waiting for. The superstar team of Warren Ellis and Simone Bianchi are ready to take the X-Men to the “Second Stage”! “ Messiah CompleX” pulled the X-Men team together, “ Divided We Stand” tore them apart. Now the X-Men are back to business -- with a new look, a new base of operations, and a mystery to solve that will take them into previously uncharted territory and test them to their core! SFX TIE-IN
The X-Men – Beast, Armor, Cyclops, Emma Frost, and Wolverine – awaken and assemble over coffee in the control room of their new San Francisco base. They are surprised when they are joined by Storm, who hasn't been an active member since she married the Black Panther.
Storm makes excuses about auditing the team on behalf of Mutantes Sans Frontieres, but when pressed by Scott she confesses to needing a break from life as royalty. Emma begrudgingly accepts her back onto the squad.
The women's verbal sparring is interrupted when the SFPD call Scott to ask the X-Men to investigate an unusual murder. The team arrives at the scene in street clothes to discover that the victim, though clearly deceased, is engulfed in flames and levitating above the ground!
Storm is able to extinguish the flames, but the body continues to float while Wolverine extracts an uncharred tissue sample for Beast. While Beast speculates on if the victim and his attacker could have been mutants unknown to him, Emma pages through the dead man's journal. He was trailing his eventual killer, and speculated he intended to travel to Chaparanga Beach.
Back at their base, Beast has some disturbing news. The dead man did not have a mutation his 23rd chromosome, the genetic marker of a mutant. What he did have was a third set of chromosomes, which did bear a mutated gene. That made him an artificial mutant, undetectable by Cerebra!
The team takes off in their new X-Plane (short for “eXperimental”) while Beast stays behind to further analyze the gene sample. En route to Chaparanga, Cyclops and Wolverine explain to Armor that it's a junkyard for alien spaceships... and one of the most dangerous places on Earth.
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