New team vs Ngari
Quote: Cannonball- "In other wolrds, ugly, the cavalry has arrived!"
Synopsis:
The scene opens at the Xavier Institute, where a still injured Wolverine has hoped out of bed and decided he will go and track down the now missing new x-man, Maggott. Storm and the other protest but to no avail. He pulls on his costume tells the others to do the same and goes out into the woods. Storm tries to reassert her leadership but that doesn’t work and Cannonball continues to doubt her leadership abilities.
While Wolvie searches in the woods we learn the reason he cant quite heal, the wounds are magically inflicted. Elsewhere the trio of Storm, Cannonball and Rogue head into Salem Center only to find the town lockdown, police everywhere looking for the “serial killer”.
Maggott looks ½ dead, even thinner than usual as he explains to his pets what the hell they have done, destroy his life being the most significant, when he lashes out at them he keels over in pain (weird). He decides to turn himself in but the X-men trio find his first. He explains to them that he thinks Eany and Meany are killing people, but Storm going off of what wolvie said earlier, tells him otherwise.
Meanwhile in the forest Wolvie has discovered a N’Gari cairn and starts bleeding out when the bouncing blue billiard known as beast arrives on the scene with Cecelia in tow (or in arm a la Tarzan and Jane). Cecilia is horrified over her new costume (he did get it from Avenger’s fashonista Wasp while he was visiting in Avengers #1-3), she then turns her anger to wolverine right before they are attacked by what appears to be dog/bear like hybrid demon magical monsters (yeah that is the best description I can come up with). Wolverine and beast try to fight them off while the doctor runs off into the forest. Wolvie then realizes that since they use magic mutant abilities are useless against them, he send beats to protect Cecelia while he holds them off.
In the forest Cecelia flees and lands right in front of her would be killer. Luckily the young Mutant marrow has made her way back to the fold following renewed confidence in “the dream” because of Angel. She slays the demon with one swift movement and knocks some sense into Cecelia long enough for beats to join them. As they stand there adjusting to Marrows return, the demons attack with Wolverine’s claws in their mouth (oh how I wish he had perished here). Cecelia freaks out, and marrow gets ready to kill!! Unfortunately they are still all captured and taken to the N’garai home world.
Meanwhile in town Rogue, Storm and Cannonball try to talk some sense into Maggott when Eany and Meany spot some demons and leap off in their direction, Maggott thinks they are trying to make a break for it thus he gives chase. Then in a bright flash they are teleported to the Ukraine, where they find many dead bodies and another cairn to the N’garai home world. Storm says they destroy it but they decide since maggott may be in danger they had best follow.
Beast’s team has been bound and captured ( beast even figures out how to cure the legacy virus but forgets it once he sees where they are). They encounter the Pilgrimm and also realize their captors are not nugari but the Ru’tai. It turns out they were inspired to overthrow the N’garai after Wolverine came killed quite a few of them.
Wolverine becomes distraught over how what he did has caused the deaths of hundreds now. Storm and her team arrive and attack Pilgrimm and the Ru’tai. In the fracas they realize that a magical eye is the source of all the problems. The new x-men Marrow and Maggott pull off a fastball special separating the object from Pilgrimm and Cecilia defeats the demon by accidentally cracking his magical Eye with her butt…….. (I kid you not!!!)
Everything then starts to crumble as the world falls apart around them. The X-Men escape with the civilians in toe and they reemerge in Las Vegas (sin city). And Marrow acknowledges for the first time being an x-man, the whole team is happy and the adventure ends with a sweet team shot! The adventure cleared Maggott of all charges and made Marrow and Cecilia become more confident in their roles as X-Men. (I love these girls)
Elsewhere and unbeknownst to them, Pilgrimm has traveled to their world in the disguise of a human student (with creepy glowing red eyes) and we see many more mysterious student appear (can you say invasion?) and the demons left stranded on earth are carted off by British black ops “black air” .
The Good!
The new X-men kick ass, we get a beautiful character piece for maggot but still have Marrow and Cecelia shining like the stars they are. The Bad!
I could say the art was weak compared to the story
The ugly!
Despite the art not being Pacheco I thought it fit the story well, honestly and this story gave us a unified team filled with dynamic and different personalities and frankly what more could you want!? 4.5/5 stars