Earth 2379 (Future Vine Prime - Designation 17)
The War to End All Wars
Something went terribly, terribly wrong on Earth 2379. There was a war of power between the LeBeau and Impero factions. The powerhouse groups played with each other for three years before it came to a culmination. A battle of strategy and brute force that left 3 million people dead or homeless.
It was at that point that the world powers took matters into their own hands. For decades they had watched their world be torn asunder by these powerhouses while, at the same time, the heroic hearts who would come in to save them had dwindled. When TB In took over France, they put plans into place that would keep something like that from ever happening again.
Nobody should ever be allowed that much power. They were cowed by the politicking of the mutants, but that final confrontation forced a hand that they had never wanted to use. They detonated Project X. It was a weapon that had been thirty years in the making.
It decimated the mutant population. A pathogen was released into the air and water streams that not only nullified the mutant gene, but it outright demolished it from their DNA. Mutates who still had their powers and abilities were left, but they were not enough to keep them afloat.
War broke out. The powered vs the non-powered. Who were the humans to have known that they had just done the only thing that would lead to the LeBeau faction and Impero's faction joining together. They had provided an outside threat that neither could handily dispose of alone.
World War M engulfed the globe entirely within three months. Former mutants rising up in protest. Unlawful mass execution of said protesters. Civil unrest that so quickly turned uncivil.
The Littlest LeBeau
Lily LeBeau grew up in the midst of it. Despite his innumerable wrongdoings, she had always had a soft spot for her grandfather Jean Luc. She had been trained in the ways of the Arashikage by her father since birth, her skills multiplying and growing on a daily basis. For a short time, he took her away into the mountains of Japan with her mother, Cassidy. Her siblings had been off with Constantine at the onset and been told not to return until given the all-clear. This left just the Littlest LeBeau as the brunt of familial attention.
At the age of fourteen, Lily and both of her parents were at what had once been the Dark Legacy base in Japan. They had taken time out from a war that had been raging for years to regain perspective and enjoy life. But there was no enjoyment left for anybody anymore. They were there for two days without incident.
That didn't last long.
An M-Ops team, designed for hunting down and either killing or capturing mutants descended. 50 of HASCs best trained men with the singular objective of obtaining Lily LeBeau as a hostage. The family unit tore through the majority of them before they were able to unleash nanites keyed to the unique DNA sequences that Kaz and Cass both had. Leaving Lily conscious, they removed the adolescent heir of legends.
The Lost Year
Cassidy forsook everything she had ever known. She allowed the MAO to capture her and torture her in an effort to break her and sway her to their side of the war. She had innumerable relationships with the (former) mutant community and was the mother to LeBeau's grandchild, a position of power within the LeBeau organization. Not to mention his one-time protege.
She made them believe that they had broken her after sustained torture, when in reality she was a double agent for the LeBeau organization and on a relentless hunt for her daughter. But Lily's whereabouts were buried in the annexes of paperwork and fudged communications.
During that year, Lily was experimented on. When they had set off the weapons and demolished the M-Gene, unbeknownst to all, they had retained a cure, a kickstarter. They used it on her to jump her powers. Photographic reflexes and an immutable healing factor were her gifts, as far as they knew.
This was both the best and worst thing that could have happened to them. The elite scientists of the HASC (Humanities Assured Survival Coalition) worked on her for three months. They stripped down her psyche, or at least believed they had. They broke her down to build her anew. Egregious experiments determining her limits were enacted upon her, all in the name of survival, of human supremacy.
Their greatest asset would be to turn Lily and set her against those who had once been her own kind. Because it had been made clear with her, specifically, that once a mutant was equivalent to always a mutant. If they had a way, others could always find one.
This egregious assault to the family tied the Impero and LeBeau factions together even tighter. In the end, it was Ishin himself who managed to locate Lily. The HASC had yet to find a way to inhibit and strip the powers of non-mutants, such as the Keijijo Clan.
There was no group infiltration to extract the little LeBeau legacy, it was a singular operation. But what Impero found was not what he had been expecting. There was no broken little girl, afraid for her life and kept in captivity. He instead found a broken young woman who had done whatever she'd had to in order to survive; including the assassination of decided targets. A young woman who was now the only mutant left on Earth due to her restored powers.
It was an opportunity that could not be squandered. He immediately took her to Iberia and the home of the Keijijo, where her father and grandfather joined them. It was an impenetrable target for anybody and anything on the planet, beefed up even moreso since the abduction a year ago. Lily stayed there and was given a home while the foremost powers and tactical minds left on Earth pow-wowwed in an attempt to put what they had found to use.
The End of the Beginning
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