I was bored to tears.
The problem was that Werner’s “nice little nest egg” was fine for an old man, but it wasn’t enough for a teenager who’d never had anything.
One day, I came up with an idea on the spur of the moment. I’d gone to the corner deli to pick up a sandwich. As I was paying, I heard the owner in the back telling one of the kids who worked there, “Remember, Marty, come back at eleven to take the till to the bank. That’s eleven, not a quarter after or half past, eleven."
I followed Marty for about eight blocks after he left, making sure I knew his facial features and the clothes he was wearing. Then I went back to the store right at eleven, having changed myself to be Marty. There was no sign of the genuine article. I figured from his conversation that he was always late. Sure enough, the owner made some noise about being stunned that I was on time for a change, gave me a canvas bag full of money, and I left.
It wasn’t much money—a couple hundred, or so—but it was a start.
By the time I hit my eighteenth birthday, I’d amassed a ton of cash.
I was bored to tears. Again.
You see, once I got the hang of it, using my powers to be a thief got boring. I mean, it was too easy.
Also, honestly, I was really starting to hate being Werner Reiman.
So I started doing other forging. God knows there was a market for it. And I never did two jobs with the same face, and I never used Werner’s face for any of them. This was a good thing, as I didn’t do such a great job covering my tracks in the beginning. There were probably about twelve APBs for guys fitting my “description,” Luckily, those guys would never be found.
I also taught myself how to use computers. By the time I hit nineteen, I’d slowly created enough documentation—both physically and online—to establish another identity. This was a young good-looking guy of thirty named Jack Bolton. I slowly drained Werner’s bank accounts and deposited it all into one I created for Jack, and moved all my stuff to an apartment in the upscale part of Central City. Then I pretended to be a neighbor of Werner’s and called his cousin Myrtle, saying nobody had seen Werner in days, and he left the TV on really loud.
Then I turned on the TV really loud, left Werner’s apartment, and never came back.
As Jack, I invested some money, and I lucked out. A couple of investments turned out great, and I was suddenly rolling in it.
But I was still bored. I kept Jack around, this time, for whenever I felt like hobnobbing with the rich and stupid, but I went ahead and created a few more identities: master forger John Askegren, mob enforcer Francisco Zerrilli, even a female pool hustler named Martina Johanssen. I dropped Askegren when the heat was on after an insurance scam, but the other two worked just fine. Not that I needed the money. But breaking up the routine—one day forging, one day hustling pool, one day beating up store owners, one day having lunch with my stockbroker—kept the boredom from setting in.
Fire alarm just went off. Better go check it out. I’ll do more tomorrow.
Jean actually laughed at that. She remembered that night. Warren had been making one of his periodic—and laughable—attempts at cooking. The result, as usual, was inedibly burnt food, the fire alarm going off, and the X-Men assembling in the kitchen ready to face some menace or other, and being confronted with a contrite Warren and ruined pots.
And the Changeling had come down and given Warren a stem talking-to that could just as easily have come from the Professor himself.
He was good at what he did, she thought. Maybe too good, she added, thinking of Johnny Brill and Wemer Reiman—not to mention Marty, that poor store clerk, who was probably blamed for the theft of the till.
To her surprise, the next entry was dated two weeks later.
September 3, 9:20 p.m.
Haven’t even thought about this journal in a while. Been busy putting the X-Men through their paces. I'm actually starting to like this. I’m used to running things, but it’s nice to do it from a position of respect instead of power or fear. When I was running the day-to-day of Factor Three, the troops followed my orders because they were afraid of me and the Mutant Master. But the X-Men follow Xavier’s orders because they respect him and care about him and believe in him. I didn’t realize just how hollow what I did for Factor Three was until I became Xavier. And I have to say I like this better. A lot better.
Anyway, the details of my life in the last entry were starting to get dull, and you probably don’t care about it. The interesting thing happened around when I hit thirty. As Zerrilli, I got introduced to a new bag man: Johnny Brill.
I almost didn’t recognize him. It had been fifteen years, and his nose hadn’t been set properly after I broke it way back when, so it looked different. And, of course, his voice had changed.
But he hadn’t changed. He was still a bully.
This really really annoyed me. I mean, I’d gone to all the trouble to teach him a lesson fifteen years earlier, and he didn’t even have the brains to learn it.
At first, i decided to try teaching him the iesson again. I had lots of ways of doing it. i couid frame him for a crime, I could ruin him financially, I could destroy his marriage. I couid even do all three. I had the power to do it.
And that was the big thing. I realized that I had the power. So why was I wasting it on Johnny Brill? He was nothing. A stupid low-life bag man for the Central City mob. This was worth getting worked up over? He was only human.
That was the kicker. He was human. I wasn’t. I was better.
A lot happened after that. A big “4” showed up in the sky on the same day that a burning man was sighted flying through the sky and a rocky monster tore up the street. Soon after, we found out that that was the Fantastic Four, right before their first battle against the Mole Man.
There was more. A big gray monster near a southwest Air Force base. A man with iong blond hair claiming to be a Norse god. Guys in New York dressed like spiders and devils.
And a man claiming to be the forerunner of a new race of humans taking over Cape Citadel, being stopped by a group of teenagers in matching black-and-yeliow costumes.
He called himself a mutant. Soon, the news was full of people talking about mutants.! finally knew what I was.
The question was, what to do about it.
I can sense Grey walking toward the study. Better put this away.
11:35 p.m.
Grey just had some administrative stuff to take care of, and we also set up a time to work on our telepathy tomorrow. She’s been fantastic. We’re both new to having telepathic powers. Xavier had repressed her psi abilities when she was a kid, and only took those blocks off recently. As for me, I had minor psionic talents all along, it helped make my shapechanging more convincing, allowed me to telepathically influence people into seeing what they expected. Xavier boosted that ability tenfold when I took over as him. But it’s taken some getting used to. Grey and I have been kind of encouraging each other. Under other circumstances, I might try making a play for her.
No, scratch that. She’s way too young for me. I keep forgetting that she’s only eighteen years old. She carries herself better than most women i’ve known, but she really is still just a girl.
Besides, it’s patently obvious that she has the hots for Summers, only he’s too into the brooding thing to realize it.
It's getting late. I have an early session with the X-Men tomorrow. I’ve got to keep working them hard. We’re all going to need to be in tip-top shape when the Z’Nox finally get here.
Jean’s head spun. She wasn’t sure what disturbed her more, that the Changeling was attracted to her, if only a little, that he thought so highly of her, or that her feelings for Scott were so transparent to him.
Every time she wanted to hate the man, she found that she couldn’t bring herself to do so. But every time she wanted to like him, she’d learn of another despicable act he’d performed.
September 6, 8:15 p.m.
I was going through some old files of Xavi
er’s today. Found a couple of newspaper clippings. One in particular caught my eye. An old New York Daily Globe front-page item: mutant menace! dr. bolivar trask, noted scientist and
RESEARCHER, WARNS OF A MUTANT PLOT AGAINST U.S.
I remember the first time I saw that headline. It was probably the second most important day of my life, after the day I woke up with a new face when I was fourteen.
While I maintained apartments for Zerrilli in the Heights and Johanssen in the projects (I’d dumped the Askegren persona at this point), i spent most of my time at Jack Bolton’s large house in the Central City suburbs. One night, I went home to find someone in my living room.
First off, just that someone was in my living room was pretty spooky, since I had a state-of-the-art security system that hadn’t been messed with at all. The intruder got past it without tripping it.
He stood in the middle of the living room. He was wearing a large, black, billowing cloak with a hood that covered most of his face. And what the hood didn't cover was taken care of by a metal mask. I basically had no idea what he looked like.
"Who are you?”
“Greetings, Mr. Bolton,” he said in an electronically filtered voice. "Or should I say Mr. Askegren. Perhaps, Mr. Zerrilli? Ms. Johanssen? Mr. Reiman? Or shall I follow the lead of St. Julian’s Orphanage and call you Mr. Sage? Such a multifaceted little changeling you are.”
Suddenly I was very very scared. More scared than I’d been since any
time after I left the orphanage. In fact, it was the first time I’d been scared since then. There was no way anyone could connect me to all those names. One or two, maybe, maybe, but not all of them.
“Who the hell are you?”
“My real name is unimportant. You see, my dear changeling, while you are a mutant, I am the master of mutants. And I have a proposition for you.”
I didn’t know what this guy could do, but I figured it was more than I could, if he could break in here so easily. So I said, “I’m listening.”
A gloved hand emerged from the folds of his cloak. It held a newspaper. “Have you seen this?” he asked.
It was the same Globe headline about Trask. “No,” I said. It didn’t take long to get the gist of it. Trask, an anthropologist, was claiming that mutants had a “secret agenda" to take over the United States, and would enslave normal humans in labor camps.
“Sensationalist hogwash,” I said, tossing the paper aside. “What does it have to do with me?”
“Oh, Trask is doing more than what you see there. The public doesn’t know of it yet, but he has been developing Sentinels. Giant robots that will seek out mutants and stop them."
Another type of fear gripped me. “Stop them how? And how do you know this?”
“The same way I know who you are, changeling. I am the Mutant Master. And Trask’s Sentinels will fail.”
“How do you know that?"
“Because Trask is an anthropologist, not a roboticist. His Sentinels are flawed. They were ineptly conceived and incompetently constructed. I have every faith that they will fail in their intended task.”
“Then why show me this article?” I asked. I was completely confused by the entire conversation, and I was still waiting for the proposition the Mutant Master had promised.
“Because Trask raises an excellent point. Mutants are the next step in evolution, and by rights, we should take over the world. My proposition, changeling, is to form the very conspiracy that Trask imagines. I have already begun to construct this organization, which I have christened Factor Three, but I need a second-in-command. Someone who can handle the day-to-day operations. Someone who can combine his shapechanging abilities with the resources at my disposal to seek out and recruit allies and gather information on enemies. You are ideally suited to this task.”
I thought about Johnny Brill. I thought about how easily I had manipulated humans to gain money and power. And yet, what kind of power was it, really? I was three different false people. The Mutant Master was giving me an opportunity to be someone.
That someone would be the Changeling.
I not only accepted the Mutant Master’s proposition, I also offered to provide funding for Factor Three. Fie declined that, saying it wasn’t an issue, and said, “I’ll be in touch."
And then he just disappeared. Which, if nothing else, explained how he got past my security system.
Over the next few months, we put Factor Three together. I sought out and recruited a variety of mutants. These were grown men who called themselves “the Vanisher,” “Unus the Untouchable,” “the Blob,” and “Mastermind.” I have to admit, I’ve never understood the need for such colorful names. I mean, yes, I call myself “the Changeling,” but that’s due to a lack of alternatives. But when you’ve got a perfectly good name like Fred J. Dukes, why on Earth would you prefer to be named after a stupid movie monster?
Not all our recruits came willingly, of course. While Dukes and the other three seemed eager to further our cause, Sean Cassidy, a former Interpol agent, was more reluctant. But I was able to put him under our control using the amazing technology the Mutant Master had at his disposal. (With all the gadgetry he had, it was no wonder he turned down my offer of funding.)
The long-term plan was to start a third World War by convincing each super power that the other side had launched a strike. When the two powers wiped each other out, the third factor (us) would take over. Mutants would finally rule.
It started to unravel when we kidnapped Xavier and 1 began doing surveillance on the X-Men. For one thing, the Mutant Master was getting more and more unstable. He started firing laser blasts at me to keep me in line, and gave ever-more eccentric orders.
But more to the point, I saw something in the X-Men. They were fighting to save humanity. And Dukes and the other mutants we had gathered were all just in it for themselves. They didn't care about the destiny of the human race, they were just thugs who wanted revenge on the X-Men for past indignities.
Finally, I realized what was happening. The war we were trying to start wouldn’t just wipe out most humans, It would wipe out everything. I checked the Mutant Master's computer, and it confirmed what I was starting to suspect. My boss was trying to kill everyone, mutant and human alike. And that’s when
I realized why'he had access to such amazing technology. The “Mutant Master” was an alien trying to destroy the Earth.
The X-Men had managed to stop the missies from being fired, and had returned to Factor Three’s base to stop us. Dukes and the others prepared to defend the base. Disguising myself as Xavier, I convinced the X-Men to stop fighting their fellow mutants, but rather focus their attention on Factor Three itself. I also sowed enough doubt in Factor Three’s enforcers about their boss’s true motives to make the “Mutant Master” panic and attack everyone. That did my work for me. Between the X-Men and the Factor Three enforcers, the Mutant Master was defeated, his alien nature revealed.
in the end, the alien committed suicide when he realized he had failed. The X-Men let everyone go, including me. After all, they’re not like the Avengers. They had no authority to arrest us, no facility to imprison us.
At first, I returned to Jack Bolton’s house in Central City. But I couldn’t go back to that life. Seeing the X-Men in action, seeing these kids risking everything to make the world a better place, opened my eyes even more than realizing I was above petty revenge against Johnny Brill.
I needed to do something worthwhile for the world I’d almost destroyed.
Then the pains started. A trip to the emergency room confirmed that I had cancer. Best guess was that I got it shortly after I started working for Factor Three. It had gone too far to be operable, and chemotherapy wound up doing no good whatsoever. (The joys of being a mutant, probably—our kind tend to have an increased resistance to radiation.)
So I went to the one person who would understand a mutant wanting to leave the world a better place than it was when he came in: Xavier.
I didn’
t expect him to ask me to take over as him. But it was something I figured I could handle. I even got to learn something about myself: that I was a telepath, too. In some ways, I was glad I didn’t find that out until after Factor Three. If I was even close to being on a par with Xavier then, things might’ve turned out a lot differently.
I just read over what I wrote. Wow. I can see why people do this now. It feels kinda good to get it all down on paper like this. Kind of liberating, you know?
I’m not sure what anyone’s supposed to get out of my life story. I mean, let’s face it, “If you’re a shapechanger, don’t hire on as the second-in-command of a terrorist organization led by an alien out to destroy the planet,” isn’t exactly universally applicable advice.
Still, maybe it’ll do somebody some good some time.
Maybe that somebody’ll be me.
September 7, 6:00 a.m.
Had a strange dream last night. A woman was asking me my name, and I couldn’t tell her what it was.
And what would I tell someone who asked me that now? Charles Sage is a name some nuns made up. Jack Bolton, John Askegren, Francisco Zerrilli, and Martina Johanssen were names I made up. Werner Reiman and Charles Xavier are really other people. Even “the Changeling” is a nickname an alien had for me that I took as a cutesy moniker.
What will they put on my headstone when I die?
I have no idea.
I don't even have a proper will. Whose will would it be? Jack Bolton's? He’s not real, and any competent lawyer would tear it to ribbons.
What kind of legacy am I going to leave?
Dear God in heaven, I'm dying, and no one will know who I was ...
10:20 a.m.
What maudlin garbage I wrote before. Oh, well.
I let McCoy and Drake head into the city for dates with their girlfriends. Meanwhile, Worthington, Summers, and Grey have a session this afternoon.
Jean shuddered. That was the day that Hank and Bobby first encountered Grotesk in the subway. What happened that day would lead to the Changeling’s death.
She wasn’t sure she wanted to keep reading.
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