Rogue and Mystique reunite!
Originally Published October-November 1999
We begin with Mystique on the run from some ninjas of mysterious origin. She gives them the slip by disguising herself as Sabretooth. I'm in kind of a bad mood today so I don't really have time to play along.
Kurt splits off and agrees to meet up with them later at a previously-arranged point.
Meanerwhile, for some reason there's a Japanese sub in the North Atlantic, speaking cryptically about their target, Mystique.
Mystique finds her surrogate daughter Rogue at the club and approaches incognito, getting a wham for her troubles before straightening it out.
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| Hey, if Mystique's clothes are her body, what happens if Rogue touches her jacket? These are the things I think about. |
Meanwhile at a church -- the most happenin' place on a Friday night at 1 AM -- Kurt runs into an old friend.
Unfortunately, he forgets he's got his image inducer on -- one of the rare occasions when it would be less creepy to be a fuzzy blue demon guy -- and Lorna reacts accordingly, getting roughly the same treatment ashos mother got under the same circumstances.
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| Somewhat straining credibility that she is not Lorna Dane |
Like Raven, Kurt flips his face and irons the whole miscommunication out.
Meanwhile, Mesmero and Mastermind trade ominous dialogue. They're mixed up in this... somehow.
Back at Mystique's safehouse (a stylish penthouse owned by one of her personae, reclusive billionaire "B. Byron Biggs") she reveals she has been masquerading as Vogue cover gal Roni Lake for the past few months, until she inconveniently became the target of ninjas.
Elsewhere, Kurt and Lorna share a moment, as Lorna reflects on Alex's recent death in an exploding time machine incident (it happens.)
She's convinced -- probably not without reason, if you're a regular reader of X-Men comics -- that Alex survived, somewhere, somehow.
While Kitty bodyguards Mystique at the safehouse, Rogue arrives at "Roni Lake's" apartment in Brooklyn Heights to investigate. She has a think about her history with Mystique, and how they became estranged after she defected to the X-Men. She also gets some basic details about her own life wrong.
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| You're from Mississippi, Rogue -- unless you really absorbed that much of Gambit |
As they are wont to do, some ninjas attack -- government ninjas, as it happens -- believing that Rogue is simply yet another disguise of Mystique's (fool me once...)
She sends them packing, only to come face to face with Japan's top shooter...
And you know what? I'm feeling feisty, let's get to it.
So Shiro and Rogue have a hero-fight, as Sunfire believes both that Rogue is Mystique in disguise and that Mystique is responsible for one or more assassinations that have occurred in Japan. He's probably wrong on both but he's definitely mistaken about Rogue since Mystique even at her mystiquiest lacks the ability to fly or punch a hole in a tank with her bare first.
Speaking of Raven, as the shapeshifter dozes, Kitty pokes around the apartment, happening upon a note seemingly left for her by the late, lamented precog and, ahem, very good friend of Mystique, Destiny.
Phasing through the painting's canvas, she discovers...
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| Ooh, I bet there's some really steamy stuff in there |
Finally talking things out, Sunfire lays out the case: there have been a series of infiltrations in the Japanese government lately, the likes of which had to be committed by a shapeshifter. The agents on the trail were murdered, and the clues let to Roni Lake -- aka Mystique.
Rogue balks. If Mystique was involved, you'd never find out about it. And as proof, she points out that supermodel Roni Lake was in Switzerland all summer.
Sure Mystique gets around, but commuting repeatedly from Switzerland to Japan? Seems unlikely.
Meanwhile, in Downtown Manhattan, Lorna continues to lay out her case for why Alex must still be alive. After all, if he weren't, wouldn't the Living Monolith have returned? Huh? What do you say to that?
Kurt doesn't have the heart to tell her that, in fact, the Living Monolith was hurled into space months ago and thus unlikely to return in Alex's absence one way or the other.
Meanwhile, the MxM Connection realize that Rogue and Sunfire may be catching onto them, which causes them to bicker some more.
Kitty takes a gander at Destiny's notebook but finds it a little hard to parse, with repeated references to Egypt, and Xavier, and Death, and... the number 12.
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| Desth kills the one who is become Death. Couldn't be more straightforward, really. |
Rogue and Sunfire track the source of their problems to a base across the river, where they are surprised to find Mesmero and Mastermind, especially because Mastermind was believed dead of the Legacy Virus.
At loggerheads over what to do and fearing the wrath of their mysterious master, Mesmero knocks Mastermind out and pushes the button that blows the whole base up, this ruining our chances of finding out what is going on.
Back at Mr. Biggs', Kitty continues to contemplate the Diary of Destiny. She thinks of all the precogs who indicated some big... I dunno... apocalypse... might occur in the year 2000. Isn't it, after all, a little tidy that the cataclysm would occur just when the arbitrarily-marked western calendar happened to have a certain round number?
Instead, she concludes, they were pointing at a timetable -- an agenda that was somehow seeded into their writing. But by whom, for what?
In the end, Rogue and Sunfire determine how Mystique was framed by M&M, because Roni's apartment just happened to be near enough to their base that they were able to shift the blame onto her. But we have no answers regarding who they were working for and what their purpose.
Kurt bids Lorna a farewell, and once she's locked herself safely in her apartment, she confides that the real proof of life is in Alex's original costumer, where the jewel in his headgear seems to still pulse with his life. I've heard worse theories.
The next morning, Rogue and Mystique debrief and say an emotionally-loaded farewell.
And Kitty points out that, unfortunately, we're going to have to do this whole Twelve thing now.
Further Thoughts:
Though the cover of X-Men #94 touts it as a double-sized spectacular, the regular story ends on page 23 (incuding the cover) as per usual, followed by a ten-page preview of John Byrne's interquel series X-Men: The Hidden Years, of which I am openly not a fan. You'll note that this only adds up to 33 pages, which is not only not double-sized, it stretches the definition of "spectacular."
For the most part, this is, at best, the X-Men on autopilot. There's the navel-gazing examination of Rogue's psyche that doesn't really go forward in any way, just reiterating what we've known about her for years. Then there's the meaningless hero-fight and the check-ins with wayward side-characters whose series have ended. For the most part nothing to write home about all wrapped up in a mystery that, like so many mysteries that have driven the X-Men series this past year, we have no context for, and no reason to care about the answer even if one were forthcoming. As it often does, it feels like we've only got half the story, and not a particularly compelling half. It's the definition of wheel-spinning "gotta do something" monthly product, even as we are told big things are afoot.
We are told that this Twelve thing is going to be a big hairy deal, and for the moment it might be, but after failing to sell me on the drama of The Shattering (again -- the X-Men simply got tired of Xavier and left) I'm skeptical of Alan Davis' ability to deliver. He's a fine artist and even occasionally an imaginative writer, but he's not the cutting edge of comics in 1999 and I'm starting to tap my foot impatiently waiting for the next regime -- knowing full well (as I have a certain knowledge of the future) that things will take a long while to get really good after that.
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