Issue #0

"Welcome to Xavier City"

by David Wheatley

"Welcome to Xavier City," said the man at the gate. "The Ceremony begins in about an hour." He nodded his head in acknowledgement of what was said and made his way down the streets. The ceremony was personal to him in ways very few in this time could ever understand. To pay his respects to those who wore the X, and to those who had worn it before them was a debt he owed, that weighed around his soul.

2099 had been a year like none other in which the people of Earth had seen much. In a time of greed and corruption, where corporations ruled with grips of iron, things had begun to change. The rise of the second age of heroes, the rise and fall of Victor Von Doom, the war with Atlantis, the Phalanx Invasion, the flooding of the planet, and the rebirth of hope to a tiny world that had lived without it for so long. Not even the loss of it's most prominent figure, perhaps the most prominent figure of the last 150 years, had ruined that.

This city in what remained of the Savage Land was a testament to that hope, a hope dreamt of so long ago by one man, Charles Xavier. This city bore his name out of respect and out of honour, for it had been founded by several things. His dream of peace had created several generations of X-Men – mutants who worked for equality for their race, and the latest had finally succeeded in making Xavier's vision of mutants and humans working together, living together, being together in peace a reality, at least in this corner of the world.

The price had been great, but the rewards had been greater still and now there would be more than the naming of a city. The ceremony would immortalise Xavier forever. The important people of 2099 would be there, but the X-Men focused in his mind. With the dream fulfilled what role did they have in the greater scheme of things? Had the fulfilment of the dream ended the need for the X-Men? Somehow, he doubted it. He doubted it very much.