leaderless. au xmen superheroes.

There never was a Charles Xavier.

Try looking in history books and birth records. Try looking in phone books and school directories. Never was. Never will be.

The world is the same. It knows no difference -- there is no void where Charles once was, merely people moving as people do. No Xavier Institute to collect and educate talented youngsters. No Xavier to form the X-Men. No Xavier to brush up against, and push back from Magneto. No Xavier to bridge the gap between mutant and human. There is simply the bubbling eruption of mutants, changing the face of evolution with the mere act of existing.

Mutants were announced as a new form of human race in 2001. Few people knew what to make of it. Tests were being done, studies that started in the 1960s and continued through to the deaths of the first official wave of mutants, drastically different from their ancestors, though they walked the same streets, elbow to elbow in equality.

Sort of. Equality wasn't so much the thing, as what they were calling discrimination. Mutants began to see separate but equal enter their lives in new, unbalanced ways. They had their own doctors to see, their own special education -- purely for the benefit of the children, who were distracting the class anyway -- special lawyers. They were special, and had few who would speak for them. Eventually, mutants found a mecca in Mutant Town, a neighborhood in New York City that seemed to welcome them eagerly, hoping for their business in ways most places were bot. Located in Alphabet City, the neighborhood was filled with apartment buildings overflowing with mutants, both young and old. Parties in Mutant Town rage for days, making Mardi Gras look like a debutante's tea time.

And violence followed. Hatred from neighboring boroughs, and from much further afield, poured into Mutant Town. Worse still, mutants began to form factions. They turned the hate amongst themselves, strong and angry and fiercely fought over half a block here, a side of the street there, tiny measures of holding and property being bought and sold with mutant blood.

The authorities are happy to let the mutants do the work for them. What they don't kill is merely more paperwork and overstuffed jails. Mutant town has been left to itself, the justice becoming their own.

Now is the time for heroes. Now is the time for those who would don masks and capes, to fix the problems of the mutant community. Now is the feasting time for the corrupt, opportunities on every corner, a fight to win every morning. Now is the time for a line to be drawn, but whose toe will mark the sand? Who will stand up, and who will fight?

an au x-men superhero game.