Template:Featured Articles/21-2007

X-Men Mission: Scary Little Blonde Girls As part of the government's efforts to shut down all experimentation on mutants, a program studying the unusual mutation of four telepathic sisters was closed down and Charles Xavier was invited to take the girls - Sophie, Esme, Celeste, and Phoebe - on as students. A small team of X-Men was dispatched to bring the girls back to the school. Arriving at the government safehouse where they were being kept, they discovered that the place had become a telepathic Bermuda triangle. The girls, already badly shaken by the raid on the research facility where they had been kept, had lashed out at the idea of being taken to yet another new place and trapped a number of FBI agents and social workers in a net of illusions woven by the group telepathic mind. Cyclops ordered Nightcrawler and Colossus to evacuate the other civilians while he and Phoenix went after the girls. Phoenix realized that the girls were untrained and afraid, using their powers instinctively to evoke instinctual fears - for her, a wall of water, and for Scott, the mansion in ruins and missions gone bad. In return, they tried to project welcoming images of the school, and Phoenix was startled to discover that they hadn't been aware of the existence of other telepaths like themselves. The girls responded to the overtures, and dropped the illusions, allowing the X-Men to take them back to the mansion. The Stepford Cuckoos, as they are known, are sophomores at Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. Preferring to keep to their own company, they do not participate widely in school life, but are learning not to use their powers on their fellow students.