Sometime in the not too distant past…

“It was a dark and stormy night,” typed a small white beagle perched atop a doghouse with an impossibly large slanted roof as a mysterious man in a sleek, futuristic-looking wheelchair ambled by him unnoticed, his rather egg-shaped bald head gleaming brightly in the morning sunlight.

Dr. Charles Lawrence Xavier, VI, a prominent Georgetown University Law Professor and a member of an elite Washington think-tank, was out for his morning “roll” through a section of Georgetown heavily populated by an odd mixture of comic-page characters and young college students.

“Good morning, Charles!” Shouted a sweet-looking little man with a huge head and a grin to match, waving politely as he retrieved the morning paper from his front porch, his little white dog wagging its tail in approval.

“Good morning, Ziggy!” Charles hollered back in mock-plesantry, then muttered under his breath, “Riff-raff!”

Dr. Xavier rambled on until he came to a construction site in Foggy Bottom. After carefully wheeling himself into position in the shadows behind the construction barriers, well out of the public eye, he pushed a series of buttons on the fancy control panel hidden in the armrest of his mobile chair. Slowly, quietly, he and his chair sank beneath the noisy city streets to the secret lair below.

“Ah! At last, Charles! We’ve been waiting for you!” A hooded figure proclaimed as Charles drove himself into view. “The members of the board are waiting, and some of them are growing quite restless!”

“Relax, my old friend,” Replied a smirking Charles, confidently, “I shall soon put all of their fears — and yours — to rest.”

“You’d better! We have an awful lot of time, money and resources tied up in this plan of yours,” the hooded man shot back, “and failure is not an option!”

“Relax, Mr. S, I assure you it will work.” Charles said as a sly chuckle escaped from him.

At the end of a long corridor, a pair of sliding doors opened at the approach of the two men, and they proceeded inside to the well-lit bunker boardroom, where numerous robed and hooded men and women were seated around a huge, fancy wooden table, chattering amongst themselves. The mysterious Mr. S took his seat near the head of the table in a heavily ornate chair. Charles, meanwhile, wheeled himself into position at the very front of the room. A hush came over those gathered and all eyes focused on the man they had entrusted with their considerable combined power and wealth in the hope of finally achieving their dream of altering America… and the rest of the world… forever!

NEXT: A plot is revealed!