The outskirts of the new mutant home, Utopia:
Jimmy Hudson is trekking the area. Climbing a hill, he watches the sunrise.
In the settlement, most of the others are still asleep or only just getting up. Armor, who shares a room with Magma, sees a lizard in a corner. With her armor, she mimics its shape. What is she doing? Amara mumbles. Nothing, she is told.
Kitty and Rogue meet for an early morning jog. She sleep okay? Rogue asks Kitty. Yeah, and her? More or less, Marian replies. Does she wanna talk about it? There’s not much to say, Rogue shrugs. Who knew feeling normal was so boring?
They pass the container of Mach Two. Warpath mutters there go the cheerleaders. Mach Two orders him to stop ogling them. So cliché. Is he sure Kitty doesn’t know he swiped her gun? She hid it pretty well, he tells her, so she probably won’t realize it’s gone until she specifically goes looking for it. He doesn’t know why she wanted it so bad. Most everyone here has powers that can outperform a gun.
She takes the gun apart with her magnetic powers. The gun itself isn’t important, Nomi replies. What’s important is how she can use it to take down Kitty Pryde…
The settlement comes alive. Kitty welcomes Jimmy back with a hug after spending eight days in a desert. Kitty admits she’s glad he’s back. She feels like she’s surrounded by people who hate her guts. It’s nice to know he’s supporting her, no matter what.
She asks what he found. He explains the first two nights he was security for Zero, who took soil samples. They covered a five mile radius around the camp. Kitty agrees. He said the samples were fine. Some toxins but nothing Zero can’t screen out.
Then keep everyone within that five mile radius, Jimmy replies. Cuz after he started his solo recon, he walked the borders, reconned the whole pace. At a glance, it was a whole lot of things. Some rusty old towers. Some Korean War era bunkers. All pointed to what they knew. These were the DOD proving grounds way back. But nothing’s alive. No foliage to speak of, a few aged lizards. No birds, no insects. Then one night he was walking along and his boots started melting. Radiation probably. He literally ran the whole way for at least a mile.
He thinks he isolated the hot area. It’s sizeable, maybe twenty percent of the reservation and the readings are off the charts. Nomi was right. The government gave them a bad deal. And if word gets out, people are going to think maybe she’s keeping things from them.
Nomi stole her gun, Kitty suddenly states. A gift from Fury. Jimmy reminds her they can’t have guns here. Part of the conditions of the deal. But Nomi doesn’t know she knows. Jimmy warns her not to be sure. That girl has come a long way.
Later:
Outside the makeshift greenhouse Storm critically stares at the sky. She doesn’t know what to tell him, she informs Blackheath. She can’t work with what’s not there. Maybe she can divert some precipitation from Yosemite, but they are dry there too.
Never mind, Sam tells her, bowed over a microscope in the greenhouse. He tells her to come inside. He asks her if she really thinks Kitty is up to the whole task of running this endeavor. Ororo warns him not to recruit her. Mach Two and her friends give her the creeps. Kitty liberated the camps. That’s all she needs to know. Fair enough, Sam concedes.
Looking through the microscope again, he is surprised. He tells Storm he may not have liberated any camps but he may have just fed the planet. He asks her to run and fetch Kitty.
Later, Kitty looks through the microscope and asks what she is looking at. Just seeds. Modified seeds, he tells her and the small crowd that has gathered. Immortal seeds. Ghost seeds. They think. They assess and adapt. They don’t ever die. They create ideal condition for success around them. They are sentient. They don’t have brains but they have an awareness of sorts. They do little terraformations of not only the soil around them but on themselves. They adapt so they can thrive. Drop them anywhere on the Earth and they will grow.
He can guarantee that? Kitty asks. Give him a week more, Blackheath replies, then he will. Then they can announce it to the world. Kitty asks him to talk to her in private. She leads him away from the others and asks for a little discretion. He asks her what she is on about. They just invented something that will literally change the planet.
He explains how Zero had cleaned a bit of soil, Storm sucked whatever moisture from the air and they created a biosphere in the greenhouse. Zero and Blackheath did some genetic tinkering on some suicide seeds that came in the Stark package, they tried to turn off the termination genes. They don’t exactly know what happened. They were trying to create a tough bastard of a seed that would maybe grow in this dirt. It’s possible they created a sort of life form. The thing mutates at an alarming rate.
Right there, Kitty interrupts him. Mutates. That word. Does he want to tell the public they invented some mutant seeds and want to sprinkle them around? He asks what she suggests. They created it, they own it and they have a bigger issue than they can handle. She tells him to do his tests. She’ll work on the business end of things. She thinks she knows who to call.
Elsewhere, Rogue is walking when a voice calls her. Psylocke enters her mind, learning about her boyfriend. She mocks her when she learns he took the Cure. No one to touch her now. Who would want to? Rogue exclaims. She deserves to be alone. The first step is admitting you have a problem, Psylocke tells her. Enough about her lame boyfriend dramas. Let’s talk about Kitty Pryde. She’s in more trouble than she knows. She’s a fool to trust Captain America. The soldiers out there who are supposed to watch over them? She is in their heads too. They aren’t going to lift a finger to save them.
Maybe she should have taken the Cure too. She can see Rogue is having second thoughts. She and Bobby Drake. A couple of sad cases they are, pining after those they can’t have. Loyal to a leader who is in way over her head. Tragic.
This isn’t real, Rogue insists. She is the new voice in her head, Psylocke whispers. She thinks she likes it in here.
Rogue awakes with a gasp.
Kitty figures that for them a peaceful revolution is the only way. Soon military vessels arrive. Kitty explains she has one number in her phone book. Luckily, that person knows this one. This one being Tony Stark, who asks for the person in charge. Kitty welcomes him to Utopia. Oh, is that what it is? Tony mocks. He’ll take her word for it. So, she has something to show him?
In the greenhouse, he sees a few small seedlings in their beds. Tony remarks he expected to see acres of lush gardens. This looks like a second grader’s science experiment. He planted these five minutes before Stark arrived. The same base seed into different soil recipes. It’s already mutated into four different strain of grain. That’s a little more interesting, Tony admits.
Afterwards, he asks them do they know what they are up against? Genetically modified seed stock is a lucrative enterprise. Companies spend billions developing proprietary strains designed to protect that investment. Developing nations are in fact enslaved to a brand for just that reason. What they have here is a magic bullet that could eliminate an entire industry just like that. That said, the benefits are obvious. Distributed correctly, they could literally feed the world, and they would be so rich their offspring wouldn’t have to work for a millennium. They want to give it away, Kitty announces.
Stark agrees (despite the stocks in agriculture Stark owns). He’ll have his men bring the truck around. He explains he’s her new business affairs and military consultant. In the next twenty four hours, two things will happen for sure. They will hold a press conference to announce their gift to the world. He has a team that will make that happen. After that, possibly within a couple of hours, this Utopia will be attacked.
By who? Kitty demands. He could make her a list, but it would be a rather long one. They’ll want to capture the seed if they can but are just as likely to firebomb the place to ashes, but lucky for them he has something to help with that too. In the truck is a red, white and blue Iron Man armor.
Later in the evening:
Kitty and Jimmy are alone. She asks him if she is crazy to do this. No crazier than before when she announced they were all going southwest to rile up the Sentinels. He takes he hand. Is he crazy? Basically, yeah. But he’s also had her back in everything and that’s the sort of thing an armed revolutionary girl tends to notice. She warns him she is about to get a lot more negative attention. Now might be the perfect time to find a little distance. Or not, he tells her.
Night time:
Kitty wakes up in bed from a clicking noise. The gun hovers above her. Kitty pleads with Nomi this is madness. What is she trying to prove? Is this some desperate bid for attention? She’ll just phase and the bullet will phase--
The gun changes direction, pointing at the sleeping Jimmy. No ! Kitty exclaims.
Jimmy awakes. The gun is gone. What’s wrong? he asks Kitty. Everything! she sobs and hugs him.
