A week or so into the new school year, the new students of Generation X were still getting adjusted to life as Gifted Youngsters. Monet was moving in a few personal items (brought to the school by a fleet of eighteen wheelers), Paige was getting up every morning to study and exercise, and Jubilee was learning to go without her usual twelve hours of sleep. |
One particular day, Everett Thomas, now nicknamed "Synch" (after his ability to get in synch with, or imitate, other mutant abilities), and Angelo, now newly christened "Skin" were assigned a training session against each other. They fought, playfully, in the new Bio-Sphere (or as Jubilee called it, the Danger Grotto), each seeking to out-maneuver or out-fight the other. This was Emma's idea (against Sean's better judgement), as it tested the two mutants with abilities neither knew yet how to control.... Skin's overactive epidermis. |
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This situation, although seemingly of little importance in the long run, serves to illustrate a problem that plagued Skin through his earliest days with Gen X. A fear that his newly extended skin might rip, shred or tear, while in battle, or in any other situation. It was this fear (though he'd never admit it to the others) that caused him to hold back a lot in their first few adventures, so much so that he often tried to stay in, rather then go out and fight. Since this time though, it seems he may have had little to worry about, as he has never, apparently, cut himself or suffered any severe dermal injuries, since joining Gen X. |
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Shortly after that ill-fated training session, Synch, Jubilee, and their mentor Banshee, when to Boston to pick up a new student from Logan International Airport. That was a young lad from England named Jonothan Evan Starsmore, later known as Chamber. After his mutant powers first manifested and blew off the lower half of his face, Jono had retreated from the world, but Charles Xavier invited him to join Gen X in the hopes that he might someday control his formidable abilities. The mysterious mutant known as Emplate also had a vested interest in young Jono, he wanted his raw psionic powers, to feed his own vampiric need for mutant "genetic marrow". |
The ever enigmatic M (Monet to her friends) sensed the presence of the evil mutant, and used her old friend, the X-Men's former Australian teleporter Gateway, to transport the rest of the team to Logan and stop him. The battle was brief, but the famished Emplate decided it best he retreat to lick his wounds, and return another day to destroy Generation X. |
Upon returning home the kids tried to welcome the antisocial Jono, now known as "Chamber", into their fold, but found he preferred to keep to himself. Celebrating their victory, Angelo lit up a cigarette for the first time in front of the group, but before anything could come of that, Gateway left a present at the school's doorstep.... a young girl with skin of ruby colored diamond, wrapped in leather straps. Delivering the young girl, he spoke for the first (and thus far only) time in front of the Children of the Atom, he said "Penance". |
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As soon as she woke up, the girl called Penance broke out of the schools medical unit, and began running amok on the school grounds. The team tried to reign her in, but succeeded only in injuring some of their own (Paige/Husk and Banshee). Angelo avoided any confrontation, opting instead to remain in the communications center and orchestrate the events from afar. Though this proved useful, it seemed he sole reason for taking that assignment was an overwhelming fear of what the dangerous young girl might do to him. |
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It was only though an act of bravery, or stupidity, on Jono's part that Penance was ever calmed down. He felt that she was another kindred spirit. Someone who's powers prevented all contact with normal society, and made her more monster then girl. In her silent way, Penance seemed to confirm his feelings, and allowed the school to become her home, and the team her family. |
Gen X now fairly complete, the team went on other missions, one helping a young boy named Elliot, labeled a mutant by his fearful town, but, as Angelo himself put it, he was "a mutant without the benefits of being one of us"... he didn't have any uncanny powers, he was just feared and hated for being born deformed. During the battle with the villain Orphan-Maker, in an effort to save Elliot, Skin suffered a painful migraine, as it appears, he always did when using his powers. He never really seemed to "cure" himself of his migraines, nor did he ever tell anyone about them. Presumably he still suffers them to this day, but has learned to control and endure them. |
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The next few weeks were monumental to the lives of mutants everywhere. Trish Tribly, the girlfriend of X-Men and former Avenger Hank "the Beast" McCoy, revealed to the world in an exposé that there was a virus that targeted mutants, and threatened the rest of humanity. The Legacy virus was created by the evil Stryfe, and released as a way to get back at the world he hated, it made mutants suffer a slow and painful death, and had even been known to kill Inhumans (like the one that was a member of Apocalypse's Dark Riders), and even infect humans (Moria McTaggart is thus far the only human to have been infected). This news caused even more hysteria in the minds of the mutant-fearing public then ever before. It even resulted in the beating death of young mutant Dennis Hogan, not far from either of the Xavier Schools. |
Hardest hit by these events was Paige Guthrie, the young mutant called "Husk" that not only accepted being a mutant, she reveled in it. Now she didn't know what to think, and took to drinking her problems away (of course, it only took one drink for her to get stinking drunk). While Chamber comforted her at home, the rest of the kids were in New York, while Emma picked up some new students. Their site-seeing was interrupted by a young man who not only know Angelo, but believed him dead. |
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The young man has never been named (despite several appearances in the pages of Gen X), but he is undoubtably an old friend of Angelo's, and a member of his old L.A. gang. He had come from all the way across the country, to the massively over populated NYC, and just happened to run into his old friend, who was likewise, only in the Big Apple for a visit (you gotta love comic coincidences). Needless to say, Skin was not happy to see his old "buddy", nor was he willing to tell Gen X about it, and he certainly didn't want his old "buddy" to tell his old gang in L.A. that he was alive and well in New England. This was the first time a mention of "Torre" (Tores) was made, but certainly not the last. |
Any questions regarding Angelo's past would have to wait, as Emma, and her would-be students, had been shanghaied by members of the extra-dimensional Morlock terrorist organization, Gene Nation. Those members were the murderous Marrow (later killed, then reformed, to become a member of the X-Men), and the disproportionate Hemingway (later a pawn of the Dark Beast). Emma fought them off on her own, while Skin and the gang helped find one of the students, a pink-skinned young boy named Artie (who adopted Skin so to speak). Artie's best bud Leech was with Emma when she escaped and nearly killed the villainous duo. |
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