Carey Looks To Marvel U's Past and Future

X-Men Legacy #242 Preview Art

CBR: "Legacy" #242 hits stores in November, kicking off a new two-part arc titled "Fables of the Reconstruction," which will be drawn by Paul Davidson ("New Mutants"). "In retrospect, this is a story that I probably should have done before 'Collision' because it follows on and picks up some of the dangling threads of 'Second Coming.' In 'Second Coming,' we saw San Francisco get pretty comprehensively trashed by the battle between the Nimrods and the X-Men. 'Fables of the Reconstruction' is about the ongoing rebuilding of the city. It's being conducted by the civil authorities, but Cyclops is very keen to make sure that the X-Men play their part. There's a sense in which he feels responsible for it, at least in part, but also he realizes that this is a way of reaching out to the human community and showing them that the X-Men don't take their commitment to the area they live in lightly.

"Cyclops puts together a team who are directed to help with the rebuilding," Carey continued. "It's a team of real power house characters: Psylocke, Magneto, Colossus, Omega Sentinel, Danger, Hellion and Random. Rogue and Hope go along also. But things don't go quite according to plan and we end up with a very, very tense and dangerous situation between some of the members of that group."

Omega Sentinel played a role in Carey's run on the previous "X-Men" series and, just like the Children of the Vault, the writer has been looking for a way to bring her back into the spotlight ever since. "If you remember when the previous adjectiveless 'X-Men' title became 'X-Men: Legacy,' she was involved again then. We saw her go over to the Acolytes. It was always part of my long term plan to bring her back here," Carey explained. "Really, one of the central threads here relates to Hellion and his attempt to come to terms with the injuries that he sustained in 'Second Coming.' What I've done is put him and Omega Sentinel into a conflict that relates directly to that trauma."

Readers of "Second Coming" will recall that Hellion lost both of his hands in an assault on the X-Men by a horde of cybernetic Nimrod class Sentinels, and his notorious temper just might get the better of him during his interactions with Omega Sentinel, who is also a cyborg. "There's more going on than that, but yes, he's clearly not going to like or trust Omega Sentinel. She's based on Bastion's technology after all, so she's not a million miles away from the robots that did the harm to him," Carey said. "Omega Sentinel has problems of her own, though, and unfortunately, they bring her into opposition with Hellion: it's an opposition that doesn't do either of them any good."