BIOGRAPHY - Page 6
Forge had an idea to fix his relationship with Ororo further and do some good in the meantime. He visited a village in Kenya near where Storm was once worshipped as a goddess, which had long suffered from drought. An irrigation line to a nearby town had been cut off by their neighbors, leaving them in dire straits again. Forge arrived and constructed a solar-powered condenser mechanism, designed to take water from the air and create rain for the crops. He wanted Ororo’s powers as a base reading to help him calibrate the settings for the machine, so only the necessary amount of rain was called upon. Storm agreed to help Forge, but she could not bring 
herself to fully trust his motives. She brought up Wundagore and rejected the idea that “the Adversary made him do it.” Ororo felt the poisonous response Forge had towards her marriage to T’Challa had come from somewhere real, and it wasn’t something she would soon forget. They finished their work together and parted on relatively good terms. However, whatever else Forge was hoping for was not going to happen. [Storm (3rd series) #3]
Forge was drawn back into Ororo’s orbit months later when the X-Men (and the mutant race) faced another crisis. The Inhumans’ Terrigen Mist was released into the atmosphere and condensed into a roving cloud, inducing Terrigenesis in humans with latent Inhuman genes. However, the Mists also proved dangerous to mutantkind, causing various symptoms that collectively became known as M-Pox. Once this was discovered, Storm called upon Forge to craft a mobile X-Gene locator for the Inhumans, giving their mobile response team following the cloud advance notice if a mutant was in its path. He also rebuilt Cerebra into an artificial intelligence inside a mobile Sentinel shell, able to track mutant signatures. Other X-Men were quick to go to war with the Inhumans over M-Pox, though, leading to the destruction of one of the two Terrigen clouds and the deaths of mutants like Cyclops and Multiple Man. A tense ceasefire was declared afterwards, but mutants and Inhumans remained at odds. [Death of X #2-4]
Storm led the X-Men in moving the mansion to Magik’s Limbo as an X-Haven, providing any and all mutants with a safe haven from the cloud and the growing panic and hysteria among humans that M-Pox would spread to them as well. Forge lent his technical skill towards supporting X-Haven and the X-Men’s search-and-rescue missions back on Earth. Cerebra was retrofitted with a teleporter, allowing her to ferry refugees from Earth to Limbo. Forge also created a defense system to keep X-Haven shielded from the horrors of Limbo whenever Illyana was injured or her wards failed.
As the X-Men moved from one crisis to the next, Storm put constant demands on Forge’s time to find solutions to their problems. Forge began to feel underappreciated and lamented that Ororo had no time to talk to him as a person instead of as a leader. He still remembered their time 
together and thought X-Haven would have given them the chance to grow closer. Storm did find a private moment to open up, only it was with a time-displaced version of Wolverine who joined the team, not with Forge. As his griping continued, Forge was finally taken aside by Magik who told him what everybody else seemed to understand already – his time with Ororo was over, and she had moved on.
Forge was increasingly stressed on the job, given the many tasks laid at his feet. Cerebra was heavily damaged in battle, leaving her downloaded into the Haven’s computer systems until he 
could repair her body. However, Storm also assigned Forge the job of finding a way to reverse-engineer Colossus’s transformation into a Horseman by an alternate-future Apocalypse, a mission that was largely outside his field of expertise. Still, when the prisoner Apocalypse tried to play the serpent and lure Forge to secretly aid him, Forge remained loyal to the X-Men and refused to compromise himself for Apocalypse. [Extraordinary X-Men #1-16]
Mutants’ time on Earth ran out, as the Terrigen Mist began saturating the atmosphere at an exponential level. In a matter of weeks, Earth’s atmosphere would become uninhabitable to mutantkind. Storm and the X-Men prepared for preemptive war with the Inhumans, staging a first strike attack to neutralize the royal family and other Inhumans so they had a free run at the Terrigen cloud. Forge constructed a Terrigen Eater to vacuum up the cloud and condense it into a solid mass before destroying it. Storm pressed him to finish his work more quickly and the relationship between them became even more strained. As Forge positioned the Terrigen Eater to 
destroy the cloud synchronized in time with the siege of New Attilan, Storm used Cerebra to teleport from the war front and speak to Forge privately. Ororo apologized for the past few months of taking Forge for granted and acknowledged his efforts and their past relationship. She gave him no promises for the future, but the fact that she would always care for him (in some way) was enough to satisfy Forge and raise his spirits. [Extraordinary X-Men #18]
Although New Attilan fell, two NuHumans named Iso and Dante found Forge and the Terrigen Eater. Iso overloaded the Eater’s pressure regulator and knocked Forge unconscious, taking him hostage so he couldn’t make the X-Men another device. Iso assembled a loose band of NuHumans missed in the siege to fight back against the X-Men, but their spy missions uncovered the dire reason why the mutants felt it was necessary to act now. Realizing how many lives were on the line, the NuHumans awakened Forge and offered to help rebuild the Terrigen Eater. The 
brilliant prodigy Moon Girl contributed to Forge’s initial design, miniaturizing the Eater so it could be easily moved to the cloud site. Forge and Moon Girl built their new device at the Inhumans’ Ennilux Corporation and brought it to the battle scene where the X-Men contended with the freed Royal Family and their allies. Once Queen Medusa was apprised of the situation, she agreed to trigger the Terrigen Eater herself, destroying the sacred cloud of her people to avoid causing any more mutant deaths. [IVX crossover]
Forge drifted away from the X-Men after the M-Pox crisis ended. He found his way to California and joined the mutant nation of New Tian when Hydra took over America. [Secret Warriors (2nd series) #3] However, he was targeted by Cassandra Nova, who intended to begin a new campaign against mutantkind. Telepathically seizing Forge’s mind, Cassandra pressed the engineer into creating Sentinites, nanite-scale Sentinels designed to interface with the brains of humans. These microscopic robots functioned as mutant-detection systems, alerting their hosts to the presence of mutants, then triggering uncontrollable hate and fear to make them lash out at and kill any mutant nearby. Forge was eventually freed from Cassandra’s control, and the Sentinites were disabled. [X-Men: Red #4-11]
Forge chose to live a more peaceful life afterwards, avoiding active combat scenarios with the X-Men. He leant technical support to Dazzler’s stage shows and provided engineering for displays in the mutant pride parade in New York. [Astonishing X-Men (4th series) #14, Iceman (4th series) #4] Forge also recovered a time machine being wielded by the Maestro and used it to locate Old 
Man Logan’s future timeline. He offered Logan a trip back to where he belonged, and Logan accepted after resolving his outstanding business in the present. [Dead Man Logan #1-6] No X-Man could stay away for too long, however, and Forge was called into action during the final battle with Nate Grey. He and most of his fellow X-Men spent several weeks in the pocket reality timeline Grey created at the end of their conflict. [Uncanny X-Men (5th series) #9-10]