Following their battle with Magneto, Phoenix and Beast seem to be the only survivors left of the X-Men!
Reprint of and retroactive backup story to The X-Men #114 - Desolation(October, 1978)
Backup story summary:
Mother of the Bride
Storm stands at an alter as a bride, about to be married to an unnamed man with a mustache. In the church are her friends and family, the X-men. As the priest declares that the groom may now kiss the bride, he lifts the veil covering her face.
With the veil lifted, Storm now sees her groom as an undead ghoul and recoils in horror. Then she is surrounded on all sides by him and the other X-men, who are also now ghouls, and flies out through the top of the church to escape.
She wakes from the nightmare with a start, and finds herself in a dark shack with a mysterious wound on her upper arm. Confused by the dream and delirious from her wound, she tries to remember how she got here, but as she does, an actual ghoul bursts through the door of the shack. As she tries to evade him, more ghoulish hands burst through the walls, armed with gardening tools, and as they overtake the shed she sees with them the man she was marrying from her dream and begins to remember how she came to this.
After an especially stressful mission with the X-men, Storm had taken some time to recover at a beach-side resort. While relaxing by the pool, she notices another, older woman who seems visibly distraught. Upon inquiry, the woman, Alice Norton, tells Storm that she was awarded her vacation by her late husband's former employers, the Twelvetrees chemical company, after an accident at work had claimed his life. The company had said that his insurance alone was not enough compensation for the loss of Jack, her husband, but despite this gesture, she still missed her husband and was suspicious that they had never let her see the body.
Deciding to investigate for herself, Storm meets with the head of the company, Richard Twelvetrees, who does his best to assure her that, though Jack's death was obviously tragic, it was unfortunately the kind of industrial accident that sometimes happened, and that they hadn't released his remains out of sensitivity to Alice. As he begins to show Storm the miraculous new compound that they are working on, they are intruded upon by a ghoulish looking factory worker. Twelvetrees tries to pass off the ghoul as a mentally handicapped employee, but seeing that Storm recognizes him as Alice's husband, Jack, and has now seen too much, he orders the ghoul to kill her. Storm escapes by flying out a window into the jungle, but not before the ghoul has bitten her on her upper arm.
As the story returns to the present, Storm is being overwhelmed by the ghouls that the unrepentant Twelvetrees is still ordering to kill her. Too weak to fly, and having sworn never to take a life, not even ones as pitiable as the ghouls, Storm prays to mother nature to save her. Suddenly, lightning strikes everyone in the immediate area except for her, which she simply accepts as nature's will.
Log in to comment