Earth-247

Thoughts and Prayers

"What's wrong with my girl?" John interjected, done with the pleasantries.

"I'm sorry to have remained cryptic, Mr. Grey," Moira intercepted as Charles rolled back to her side of the room, "but I wanted Charles here before I went into full detail. As I said earlier, the short answer to your question is that we don't know. By all means, her body is healthy and functional. All the tests indicate she is an exceptionally healthy, well cared for, 10-year-old girl. Yet, she remains comatose. So, we threw a fistful of darts at the dartboard. One of those darts was a genetic sequencing test, and your daughter tested positive for two... abnormalities."

"What kind of abnormalities?" John demanded.

Moira and Charles glanced at each other as she passed the torch. "Are you familiar with 'mutants', Mr. and Mrs. Grey?" Charles inquired.

"Oh, no," John started, "my daughter is not a mutant."

"John," Elaine interjected quietly.

"Don't you sit there and tell me that my daughter, my baby girl, is a mutant," John continued. He turned and rested his head in the corner, pounding his fist against the wall.

"John," Elaine repeated as she stepped over and started rubbing his back. "She could be both. She'll always be your baby girl, but maybe she also just happens to be a mutant."

John broke and bawled, still hanging his head, Elaine still rubbing his back.

"It's not the end of the world, John. I mean, Y2K still might be," she joked. John caught a laugh in his throat. "It's 1999 for a few more months. Don't you want to spend them with your daughter, regardless of what form she takes?"

John embraced his wife tightly. "Our daughter," he corrected himself. "I'm sorry. She's our daughter."

Elaine gripped him just as tightly. "I wasn't even worried about that," she assured him.

They released each other but held onto one another's hand. "Sorry about that," John apologized to Moira and Charles.

"No apology necessary, whatsoever," Charles accepted. Moira nodded in agreement.

"So, she's a mutant," John stated, more to himself than to anyone else.

"Yes," Charles confirmed, "but what's more confounding is that her current condition does not appear to be a result of her mutations."

"Mutations?" John exclaimed. "Plural?"

"Indeed. She tested positive for two... well, the term the news is using is 'X-gene'."

"Is that not what they are?" Elaine asked.

Charles furrowed his brow. "Not technically, no, but it would be rather pedantic of me to explain the nuances."

"Profess— Charles... we've been in the dark for over a month. I think pedantic is what we need right now."

John nodded, still grappling with the plural of "mutation".

"Very well," Charles conceded. "The term 'X-gene' implies that it is a single, shared gene that causes a mutant to exhibit abilities, that you either have the 'X-gene' or you don't. The reality is that there are numerous genes — some we have documented, some we have yet to — that cause an individual to exhibit one or more abilities. All these genes descended as mutations from a single ancestral gene, and it is that ancestral gene that I suppose you could correctly call the 'X-gene'."

"So, when you say 'mutations', you mean they found more than one of these... 'sub-X-genes'?" Elaine questioned.

"Indeed. Although, to continue my pedantry, the term we use is 'I-MOMA'. A MOMA is a mutation observable by metahuman ability, and it can either be intrinsic or extrinsic. An extrinsic MOMA — an E-MOMA, if you will — is what you read about in old comic books. A man falls in a vat of acid and suddenly has superpowers. An intrinsic MOMA is a result of these descendent genes. Theoretically, another gene in the human genome could mutate and result in metahuman ability for the host, but we've yet to discover one, so we operate under the assumption that the only I-MOMAs we're going to find descend from that ancestral gene."