Prologue

Our outing to the general public was anything but advantageous to us. The government had known about us, but hadn't deemed us a threat when there were tangible and active threats to confront. It wasn't until a particularly powerful but young mutant lost control of his ability and the government couldn't cover it up quick enough. The boy was thirteen; his name was Daniel. Daniel's father, James, was at work at his architectural firm. Daniel's mother, Kate, was a stay at home mom. She was also abusive. Daniel and his mom were home, and he ran out into the front yard, trying to get away from her, and she followed him out. Seeing as it was noon on a pleasantly weathered Saturday, practically the whole neighborhood was outside. And the rest came to watch the spectacle when they heard the shouting. The police were called, but they wouldn't get there soon enough to see everything.

Daniel was telekinetic, and his oddities made him an outcast at school. What no one knew until the incident was that his oddities came from his struggle to hide his abilities. He was more than just an exceptionally powerful telekinetic, he was an abused telekinetic who couldn't control it. More than likely, he just wanted his mom to stop yelling obscene things at him. The neighbors' reports and the videos taken on phones show that she actually started to beat him, but that didn't last long. All the reports and videos are consistent on what happened after Daniel fell to his knees, clutching his head and shouting in agony. As he dropped, his mother was tossed backward about ten feet by an invisible force. She wasn't injured, and she just came back at him, but by that time, he was seething in anger rather than yelling in pain. He screamed, it sounded like the word "stop" but no one pays attention to that because what happened next was of much more interest. As he screamed, a bright white ball of light appeared between him and his mother, and it expanded rapidly, in less than a heartbeat, and when it dissipated, nothing was left of the boy, his mother, or their property. The grass was burned brown but there was no indication anything had ever been there. And it was all caught on camera. The police arrived just as Kate was thrown back, so of course to them it appeared like it was all on Daniel.

When the US government finally admitted the boy was a mutant, the world went crazy. Other governments came out admitting that they had known about the existence of "unique peoples" but that there was nothing to be concerned about, and they should continue on with their daily lives. The insistence didn't take hold, however, with the video of Daniel posted by a neighbor receiving over 5 million views in four hours.

Of course, no one mentioned that he was being abused, and everyone knew it, yet had done nothing to stop it. Daniel was simply a mutant who lost control, which proved they couldn't be trusted in society. Never mind the fact he was being abused, he was also a thirteen year old boy, who was an outcast, and could do things that no one else could, making him feel more alone.

The first month after the revelation, suspicions were high and everyone was panicked. Anything out of the ordinary had people claiming others were mutants, and mutant hate crimes outranked any other kind. There were marches and protests, stores and restaurants refused to service mutants, despite the fact they had no idea who actually was a mutant. After the month passed with no other deaths at the hands of a mutant, people calmed as they got distracted, but the government was still being pressure to do something about the "mutant problem." Bills and policies were being written up and presented in both state and federal governments. Nothing was close to passing yet, partially because everyone was so divided, but also because there were so many options to consider. Mutants held their breaths and stayed under the radar as they watched on television while people condemned them for being different and called for a variety of actions against them. One radical group was calling for euthanasia, and pro-mutant scientists informed the populace that the mutations were the next natural step in human evolution. A research paper by a former Oxford student about these kinds of mutations were cited frequently, quotes being used for both sides of every argument. Some scientists were proposing all mutants be rounded up and brought in for research and scientific purposes. Others claimed there were already too many for large scale round-up, but only because there was nowhere to hold them all.

It was the proposals that the mutants be studied for science that worried the mutants most; they could read between the lines and knew it really meant they'd be experimented on, and they knew they would fight before being taking into custody.

Still, as things calmed down, and there were no new mutant "sightings" or "incidents" to report, the news and conversation moved to new things happening. Three months after being outed, things had calmed down – fast, even for human attention spans, but we mutants were grateful.

Even knowing that as soon as something new and shiny happened to bring attention back to the mutants, we didn't know how to prepare ourselves. And we didn't know that the something shiny was about to happen, though it wasn't started by us.