Nathan Dayspring

By request of the previous player and/or mod decision, the Phase 1 version of this character is not available for applications. They are available as a new Phase 2 version only. If you have questions, check the FAQ on applications, or feel free to contact the mods at x_moderators @ googlegroups . com.

PHASE 1

Nathan Dayspring - Deceased
Portrayed by Gerard Butler
Codename:	Cable
Affiliations:	Elpis
Birthdate:	April 1, 1966

Journal:	The mind is the final battlefield
Player:	Retired

Nathan Dayspring is the founder of the mutant-focused humanitarian organization known as Elpis and a former member of the X-Men. He was killed in the Dark Phoenix Saga in 2015.

Details

Character Journal: x_cable

Real Name: Nathan Morrow

Codename: Cable

Aliases: Nathan Dayspring, Nathan Winters

First Appearance: February 21, 2004

Date of Birth: April 1, 1966

Place of Birth: Bethel, Alaska

Citizenship: American

Relatives: Moira MacTaggart - Phase 1 (wife), Rachel Kinross (daughter), Saul Morrow (father, deceased), Esther Morrow (mother, deceased), Gideon Faraday (uncle, deceased), Aliya Sundell-Dayspring (first wife, deceased), Tyler Dayspring (son, deceased).

Education: BA in History, MA in International Affairs, J.D.

Relationship Status: Married

Occupation: Researcher and lobbyist for Elpis, languages teacher

Team Affiliation: X-Men (reserve member)

Biography

Childhood

Nathan knows very little about his childhood. Repeated telepathic alterations of his mind caused enormous holes in Nathan's memory which his traumatized mind attempted to fill with fabricated memories. The damage was so severe that, thirty years later, even Charles Xavier is unable to help restore what was lost.

What he knows is that when he was twelve, something happened to make him leave the family home in Alaska. His father, Saul Morrow claimed that his memory of a violent confrontation was inaccurate, but did not provide an alternate explanation. Somehow, Nathan wound up in San Francisco, living on the streets and attempting to manage his newly manifested psionic abilities. Two years later, he was picked up by Social Services and sent to New Mexico to be enrolled in a government program known as Mistra.

The Mistra Years

Mistra was one of several government programs designed to take mutant children and turn them into operatives - in this case, psionically conditioned 'super-soldiers' indoctrinated in a pseudo-Spartan collective culture. Nathan spent sixteen years as an operative, rapidly rising to the rank of field leader. He has not shared many details about his time with Mistra, although he has at various points made reference to spending a great deal of time in Iran, having been involved in the Gulf War, and spending a year undercover in Kazakhstan. His cult of personality among his fellow operatives led the Mistra directors to devise a plan to get him under tighter control. Sending him and his team to destroy a bioweapons facility in China, they set up a trap; Nathan's team was killed, and he was exposed to a biological weapon that he would discover, years later, was specifically tailored to put checks on his powers.

There were unforeseen consequences. After some time convalescing on Muir Island under the care of Moira MacTaggart, called in as a specialist because of the unexpected virulence of the virus, Nathan returned to Mistra a changed man. His conditioning broken, he made plans to escape with his wife and child, but Mistra sent a retrieval team after them. Aliya and Tyler were killed, and a badly injured Nathan barely managed to escape to Mexico.

The Pack

During his first year out of Mistra, Nathan traveled the world, tracking down each and every member of the team involved in the deaths of his family. On one such hunt, in Cambodia, he encounted GW Bridge, a CIA officer dying by the side of the road after having been betrayed by his partner during an arms deal. For reasons he was never able to fully explain, Nathan rescued the dying man, who soon became his closest friend. Bridge later followed him to New Mexico when Nathan went back to destroy the Mistra home facility, preventing him from walking out into the desert and dying.

Once Nathan had recovered, Bridge had a proposition; as neither of them could go home again, he suggested that they take their skills and experience and go freelance, offering their services as mercenaries. Joining them in this was David Rabin, a former Mossad agent. The three of them gradually recruited others. Nathan, on a trip to Hong Kong with Bridge, spent an evening at one of the underground fighting pits and saw a very young fighter by the name of Domino taking on two fully-grown men. He purchased her contract from the manager of the fighting pit, and he and Bridge raised Domino, who insisted upon putting her skills to work with the Pack as soon as she was of legal age.

Over the next several years, the Pack operated in Eastern Europe, the former USSR, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin and South America. They earned a reputation for being highly competent - and scrupulously attentive to the terms of their contracts. At various times they were employed by national governments, especially Britain, for high-risk missions such as nuclear sabotage in Kashmir and North Korea.

Living At The X-Mansion

After the event of X2, Nathan's precognition went out of control, beginning with nightmares and violent precognitive episodes and later increasing to blackouts. Eventually he contacted Moira MacTaggart - Phase 1, with whom he had maintained a close and affectionate friendship over the years. She convinced him to come back to the United States and to Xavier's school for help.

His first few months at the mansion were marked by increasing health problems due to his precognition. Although he managed to form strong relationships with some of the staff and students, including Angelo Espinosa, Amanda Sefton, Cain Marko, and Alison Blaire, his health problems worsened. Charles Xavier eventually intervened, and managed to make contact through the precognitive link with the Mother Askani, who was initially hostile, insisting that Nathan needed to help her people.

The situation was eventually resolved when Nathan took it upon himself to play host to Askani's astral self. Left with the memories and psychic essences of her and her clan, Nathan found himself with a new outlook on life. Shortly thereafter, he began working as a teacher at the school, seeing it as a way to contribute to a better future for his fellow mutants. Not long after that, he was asked to become a reserve X-Man.

The Road To Youra

Early on in his tenure at Xavier's, Nathan was summoned to New York by an old acquaintance of his from Mistra, Colin MacInnis. He returned to the mansion two days later with only fragmentary memories of his time away. Months later, a Mistra retrieval team kidnapped Moira in an attempt to get Nathan to trade himself for her. It turned out during his previous disappearance, he had been implanted with a psionic worm program. Upon activation, this Trojan Horse would destroy his conditioning and do the same for any Mistra operative within his telepathic range - but result in his own death. A contrite MacInnis provided Xavier with the triggering phrase and the Trojan Horse was successfully triggered under controlled conditions, freeing Nathan of his conditioning.

After some months of recovery, Nathan found himself drawn back into MacInnis's anti-Mistra operations when he was alerted to the presence of a conditioning centre in Vermont. The recovery mission saved Kyle Gibney, the sole survivor of the group of children undergoing conditioning. Mick Foley, a member of the Mistra team Nathan's team encountered at the conditioning center, experienced a break in his own conditioning and fled. Nathan, again warned by MacInnis, went to Belgium with Alison to retrieve him before Mistra could recapture him.

Over the following months, the threat of Mistra temporarily receded, and Nathan continued to train to become an active X-Man. He assisted Remy LeBeau in a complicated operation in Las Vegas, and helped save Cain Marko's life when the Crimson Gem was shattered, an act that left Nathan himself temporarily blinded. He also asked Moira MacTaggart to marry him. The two of them found out near the end of the year that they were expecting a child.

Early in the following year, the X-Men received a call for help from MacInnis, whose helicopter had crashed with several rescued children aboard in Northern Canada. The X-Men went in to retrieve them and fought a Mistra team charged with the same mission, freeing the Mistra field leader, Timothy Morgan. With Mistra's operatives in disarray and the directors on the run, the government, MacInnis's people, and the X-Men made plans to cooperate to take them down for good.

The final operation took place on the Greek island of Youra. Though a last-ditch, scorched-earth tactic by one of the Mistra directors led to a high death toll on both sides, the joint task force was ultimately successful. Nathan himself successfully triggered a modified version of the Trojan Horse to stop the fighting, but was severely injured in the fighting.

Tomorrow's Children

Nathan's physical recovery was faster than expected, although emotionally he continued to struggle with the aftermath of the Youra mission. Two months later, he and Moira MacTaggart were married on Muir Island.

While preparing for their child's arrival, Nathan was shocked to discover that Mistra had possessed a copy of his birth certificate. With the help of the government taskforce, he reunited with his father, Saul Morrow, only to discover that his fragmentary memories of his childhood were apparently inaccurate.

Deeply confused, Nathan devoted himself to continuing his rehabilitation, and was soon back on active duty with the X-Men, taking part in a number of missions. In the meantime, he continued to investigate his father's claims, with the help of Remy LeBeau, Madelyn Bartlet, and Jake Gavin. The search eventually led to a businessman by the name of Gideon Faraday. Nathan and Remy broke into the headquarters of his company, Eris Consulting, only to be surprised in the act by Faraday himself, who displayed a mutant ability to synch to the powers of others - in this case, Nathan's telekinesis.

Several weeks later, while investigating a training camp for mutant children in Chad, the X-Men again encountered Gideon, whose company had been involved in setting up this camp and others. His suspicions mounting, Nathan nevertheless continued to stay in contact with his father. Shortly after the birth of his daughter, Rachel Kinross, Nathan met with his father in New York, and was introduced to his uncle - Gideon. Gideon and Saul revealed themselves as mutant supremacists adhering to a Social Darwinist ideology, Gideon informing Nathan that he had been responsible for his enrollment in the Mistra program, as well as for the deaths of his wife and son. All of this had been done to turn Nathan into the ultimate survivor. Devastated, he fled the scene.

With support from Moira, Charles, and many others, he determined not to allow these revelations to derail his life. Continuing in active service as an X-Man, he began freelance humanitarian work in an attempt to work against his family in that sphere as well. Over the following months, he did a great deal of traveling with the X-Men and also with Angelo, whom he hired as a research assistant to help him in his humanitarian work. Gideon made repeated attempts to intervene in his life, mostly notably assisting Pete Wisdom with a trap that left Nathan in the hospital. Later in the year, reeling from the loss of Askani in the events at the Hellfire Club, Nathan was left frantic when Gideon kidnapped Domino to lure him and Pete to Namibia to rescue her. There, Nathan discovered that his mother's involvement in his family story was also more complex than he had imagined. A precognitive as well, she left him advice in the form of a map that allowed him and his team to rescue Domino.

The New Year turned tragic when Gideon lashed out yet again, killing Bridge with Nathan's own powers. Nathan struggled to find a way to fight back more effectively, and with the X-Men's help, was successful in entrapping Gideon and exposing his involvement in mutant slave trading. Saul, in desperation, set up a 'summit' between his son and his brother. Nathan went along with this, trusting in his precognitive visions to lead him to a resolution. Gideon betrayed his brother, kidnapping Nathan and taking him to South America, where he revealed that what he wanted was to synch to Nathan's precognition and see the distant future. Outside Ushuaia, the 'city at the end of the world', he succeeded in recreating Nathan's precognitive link and was fatally injured by Askani, who told Nathan that Gideon's death meant that her future had been definitively changed and then vanished from his life forever. Saul then killed his brother by allowing him to synch to his cell-altering ability and then committing suicide. Nathan and the team of X-Men sent to rescue him returned home.

Elpis

Nathan returned to the X-Men immediately after the events in Ushuaia, diving into that and his other work in an attempt to avoid having to deal with his father's death and the implications of what had happened. A few weeks after Saul's death, he discovered that his father had left him his company and his fortune. Nathan sold the company and put the proceeds and most of the rest of his inheritance into the founding of a new NGO, Elpis. Specifically addressing mutant issues in the developing world, it is to some extent Nathan's way of repairing all of the damage done by his family over the decades, but it has also become one of his abiding passions in life.

When Magneto abducted Julio Richter, the son of an old friend of Nathan's, Nathan was on the team that followed them to San Diego. With his teammates, he confronted Magneto on an offshore oil platform to attempt a rescue of Julio, but Julio lost control of his powers and caused an earthquake. Though the damage done to San Diego was significant, a greater threat was posed by the tsunami the earthquake created. Along with Jean Grey and David Haller, Nathan helped hold back the tsunami's primary wave, shattering his psimitar as he channeled the energies of three powerful psis through it. The tsunami was successfully repelled from the beach, but Nathan overstrained his powers severely, leading to a flare-up of the virus that would have claimed his life had MacInnis not appeared with information about the nature and origin of the virus. Nathan was forced to perform a partial self-lobotomy, burning out the catalyst portion of his brain that allowed him to reach beyond the natural ceiling of his powers.

He was left powerless for nearly two months, a state that forced him to reassess his life. He soon proved to himself that he could still make a difference. An Elpis investigatory trip to Afghanistan resulted in the rescue of a young mutant girl named Sooraya Qadir. Nathan took Sooraya under his wing when they returned to the mansion, assisting her with her English and the process of adaptating to her new circumstances. Though he was troubled by frequent telekinetic fits and severe headaches, Nathan came to accept that he did have worth even without his powers...

... just in time for them to return. Although he had lost some telekinetic function due to the brain damage and psionic scarring, his abilities were not significantly diminished. Returning to the X-Men, he led a mission to Alcatraz when a mutant Chechen separatist threatened San Francisco with a nuclear weapon, and was both surprised and pleased when Angelo decided to begin training for the team.

He also continued his work with Elpis. Most of that fall was dominated by the situation in the Czech Republic, where reactions to San Diego were running high and both anti- and pro- mutant groups were caught up in a cycle of violence. The Czech government sealed off a neighborhood, Smichov, where the worst of the violence was taking place, leading to a humanitarian crisis. Nathan, Angelo, Rahne, and Medusa traveled to Smichov as observers, to document what was happening and help other NGOs with an assessment of humanitarian needs. There they encountered Mystique, who was manipulating the mutant militants trapped in Smichov, although she claimed she was encouraging non-violent resistance. Nathan contacted the mansion, and Xavier attempted to get permission for the X-Men to enter Smichov and remove Mystique. It was refused, and Smichov erupted in rioting, evoking a response from the Czech military that left the neighborhood ablaze and many dead.

Soldiering On

For Nathan, the events in Smichov were only one more reason to devote himself to both the team and Elpis. His workaholic tendencies only grew worse, however, and his encounter with Mystique in Prague left him doubting the ethical limitations he had placed upon his use of his powers. He resolved this by 'outing' himself as a telepath in his work at the UN, a decision whose consequences are still being felt.

Returning to Youra with the team to help the Greek government shut down a military experiment gone wrong, Nathan found himself struggling with memories of the final operation against Mistra. This all happened shortly before the one-year anniversary of Bridge's death, sending Nathan into an emotional tailspin that he corrected with a winter climb of Mount Washington and a brief ritual of sorts at the summit.

A sequence of X-Men missions shortly thereafter pushed Nathan to his physical limits. He was slow to recover after a near-drowning in Russia left him with pneumonia, but insisted on taking part in the capture of Sabretooth and the rescue of President McKenna's daughter from mutant terrorists. He even traveled to Kansas City to help out with relief efforts there after a devastating blizzard, but soon realized that if he was going to properly recover, he needed time to rest. He headed to Muir, intending to do so.

Events conspired against him. The Elpis office in Tel Aviv was one of the targets of a coordinated campaign of suicide bombing by a new militant mutant group, the Preservers. Nathan raced to Tel Aviv to do what he could for his injured friends and to spearhead the effort to see Elpis through the crisis. He drove himself to his limits and beyond, and while he managed to avoid collapsing from exhaustion, the stress did begin to wear away at him badly. When the X-Men were sent out after the Preservers and their bombmaker, Nathan was injured in the ensuing fight, but managed (with some pharmaceutical help) to keep the badly damaged Blackbird in the air on the way home. Off active duty afterwards because of his dislocated shoulder, Nathan tried yet again to concentrate on rest and relaxation.

Things seemed to take a turn for the better during his recuperation. He led a field trip to Hungary for a memorial service for the victims of the bombing there, only to find himself and his charges in the middle of a massive street party as Istvan Barath was elected as Prime Minister and the first openly mutant national leader, much to the delight of his countrymen. Unfortunately, an old acquaintance with malevolent intentions soon surfaced; Rory Campbell, still quite mad after the events of Proteus (plot) and still obsessed with Moira, kidnapped three of the students and turned them into Hounds, using an experimental procedure that altered their DNA. Though Nathan was involved in the rescue, he was haunted by Campbell's choice of tactics.

Immram

Nathan continued to handle the aftermath of the Hound incident poorly. For a time, he even avoided Campbell's three victims, and resolutely avoided his therapist, despite gentle (and sometimes not-so-gentle) pushing from Moira and his friends. It was during this time that he attended a charity ball for rainforest preservation - on his own, as Moira had to return to Muir to attend a patient there - and met Tara Trask, a professor of gender history at Bryn Mawr. An enigmatic woman, she demonstrated what could only be termed a fascination with him, making ambiguous references to a mutual acquaintance of theirs. Upon departing the ball, an unsettled Nathan discovered a note in his pocket, written in Askani - presumably from Trask.

He set about trying to find out more about her, even reading her published articles, but was unable to get in touch with her personally. Before he could continue his search, Moira conspired to get him to take a brief vacation, accompanying other staff and students to Las Vegas after Sam Guthrie won a contest. The group was soon kidnapped and put into Arcade's Murderworld, as part of a larger conspiracy masterminded by Selene's cult. Nathan, like most of his fellow hostages, spent a large part of the weekend drugged. Unlike them, he also spent time under the influence of a psychotropic gas being pumped into his trapped room, causing him to hallucinate. As they fought to get out of Murderworld, he continued to use his powers, despite the state-of-the-art psi-suppression equipment. As a result, he suffered psionic damage from the feedback. Between that, more mundane trauma, and the impact of his relative helplessness to protect the kids in Murderworld with him, Nathan's already unsettled state of mind worsened.

A climbing trip to Yosemite with Ororo helped settle him down, but when the island of Attilan disappeared after Medusa's engagement party, the loss of Medusa, Crystal and Forge left him grieving, if quietly. While still trying to process these events, he was shocked when Wanda came to him with the news that she had met Tara Trask at Columbia, and been invited to a lunch where Trask and her former students were carrying on a conversation in Askani. Nathan argued with Wanda about what to do, a conversation that ended badly. The next morning, he collapsed on the floor of the boathouse kitchen while getting Rachel her breakfast. Charles and Jean discovered that his shields had inverted, and Jean's exploratory trip into his mindscape established that it was a subconscious defensive reaction to a mental invasion - by Trask, a mutant with the power of astral projection, who had been exploring Nathan's memories of the Askani in the weeks since they'd met, causing his vivid dreams and increasing level of exhaustion. It turned out that Trask had been a silent witness of much of the Askani's history, unable to ever communicate with Mother Askani because of the nature of her ability, and had been trying to recreate a twisted version of the Askani for years in the current day. Nathan was seriously distressed by the news, but accepted Charles's advice that he needed fairly extensive rest to recover from the shield inversion, and departed on vacation with Moira to Santorini.

Adventures in the NGO Trade

Returning from Santorini rested and recovered, Nathan threw himself back into work, but the summer of 2007 would turn out to be memorable for the sheer number of Elpis-trips-gone-wrong. A trip to Tanzania to help an Elpis mediation program overcome some local political difficulties became much more complicated when Nathan's group found themselves caught up in a private war between a vibranium smuggler and T'Challa, the king of Wakanda. The Elpis group and Ororo (accompanying them to serve as a local guide and to get a break for the mansion) helped T'Challa bring the smugglers to justice, making the X-Men a new friend in Africa.

The reappearance of Attilan was a happier and less complicated occasion, and Nathan led a small Elpis team to the island to assess whether there were any mutants in need of specialized medical care, which allowed him to reconnect with Medusa and Crystal. But an investigative trip to Dagestan to see what aid could be rendered to a program trying to help mutant child soldiers from Chechnya reintegrate into society was nearly disastrous. While Nathan, Jim and Gabrielle Haller were there, a crazed Ilyas Saidullayev broke out of a secret prison for mutants on the outskirts of the city of Derbent. The two X-Men managed to intercept and incapacitate him, but not before a great deal of damage was done to the city. Unbeknownst to them, Magneto was also in the city, having been planning to mastermind a prison break of his own. After revealing himself to Gabrielle, he headed into the center of the destruction, confronting the two exhausted X-Men and knocking them out when they would not step aside and let him leave with Saidullayev. Nathan and Jim were taken into custody by the Russians and interrogated, but Gabrielle secured their release, and the three left Dagestan on the Blackbird, which had been racing to meet them.

Nathan spent a quiet few weeks recovering from the concussion suffered in Dagestan, then traveled to Tel Aviv to greet Anika and Ian's baby, later going to Mongolia with Doug on an investigatory trip. He continued to meet with Tara Trask in an attempt to find out what she had done with her knowledge of the Askani future, although this led to some conflict with Wanda. He served as Kevin Ford's lawyer when the young man was charged with the murder of his father, an experience that left Nathan quietly disillusioned about further involvement with the American legal system.

On the positive side of the ledger, Elpis began a major new project to address the use of mutant child soldiers world-wide. Though the subject matter raised some obvious emotional issues, not merely for Nathan but also for the ex-Mistra operatives at the Tel Aviv office, all involved were deeply committed to the cause.

Any semblance of normalcy was soon shattered - again - when Magneto hijacked a Russian satellite laser system and used it to try and extort concessions from the Russian and American governments. Nathan was part of the team that traveled into space to stop him, and when the station broke up, found himself supporting the X-Men's damaged glider through reentry, with Clarice's teleportation to help kill their momentum. The glider crashed in Tibet, and Nathan cared for an injured Clarice and Angelo, fighting to defend them from Toad and Senyaka, who had also dropped with them. Like the other scattered groups, they were soon rescued, and Nathan returned to what passed for his everyday routine quite gladly.

Dark Reflections

Just before that Christmas, T'Challa visited New York for a conference, and invited Nathan and Ororo to meet him for dinner. Their plans for the evening went awry when William Moses, the vibranium smuggler they had fought in the summer, attempted to kill the Wakandan king. The three managed to escape, though not before engaging Moses multiple times and totally destroying a subway station in the process.

Nathan had a much quieter Christmas. Unfortunatly, early in the New Year, he received a call from Ilyas Saidullayev, who claimed to have escaped Magneto and was hiding out in Chechnya, needing assistance before he lost control and destroyed the next unfortunate city that happened to host him. With Jean Grey, Nathan slipped into Chechnya on an aid plane, the two X-Men meaning to assess the situation to see if extracting Saidullayev and bringing him back to face justice in the United States was possible.

Unfortunately, it was a trap. The call for help had been masterminded by Tara Trask, who had lured Saidullayev away from Magneto and had him bring Nathan to Chechnya to let her take a stab at trying to recruit him. Unfortunately, she also confessed to having masterminded the assassination attempt against T'Challa, as well as one being carried out that same day against Istvan Barath in Budapest, where Scott, Ororo, and Forge were currently visiting. The confrontation turned violent, and after an abortive attempt to commandeer Nathan's subconscious, Trask shot him in the back. Nathan and Jean fled the Russian airstrike that followed, managing to get back to the United States.

Nathan was shaken by the incident, but more philosophical than one might have expected. His recovery was interrupted when Amahl Farouk's little 'problem' turned into a astral plane-spanning crisis. As part of the team that went in to try and dislodge an 'intruder' from Cain's mind prior to the full nature of the problem being known, Nathan was also affected adversely. In his case, it resulted in a psychotic break and confinement to the infirmary while the crisis was resolved.

Badly unsettled and doubting his own effectiveness as a telepath, he was drawn out of his self-doubt briefly by stumbling across the Stepford Cuckoos's unfortunate way of coping with the crisis. Though he was able to get them the help they needed, the doubt in his own abilities lingered, a dangerous development given Nathan's long history of phobia and subconscious inhibitions regarding that aspect of his powers. After several weeks of avoiding the problem while his shields continued to decay, Nathan was finally confronted by Jean, and accepted her help in regaining his balance.

It was easier said than done, as Nathan continued to have problems with his shields, leading him and Jean to start exploring other potential causes, including the physical. In other respects, his life returned to the equivalent of normality. He hired Kevin Ford at Elpis, as well as Tatiana Caban, a new student having difficulties adapting to the mansion. Elpis's DDR project hit a snag when a group of young mutants in Sri Lanka were kidnapped by slavers before they could enter the program; Nathan left for Sri Lanka to make arrangements for their repatriation while the X-Men retrieved them. When a semi-recovered Manuel returned to the mansion to get help with his powers, Nathan found himself supporting the younger man, despite the uproar his return caused and their own complicated history. He also worked to try and help Kevin when he reached a crisis point with his powers.

When an old enemy from Christian Kane's past resurfaced and threatened the world with a bizarre and destructive plot, Nathan was part of the team working to stop him. Though he was able to pull his weight in the field, his problems with his shields continued. A strange encounter in Kyrgyzstan while on an Elpis trip left him trapped in his own personal version of heaven until he was rescued by the others on his trip, and a trip to Wakanda went badly wrong, when the damage done to the astral plane during the Shadow King crisis allowed two entities from the dawn of Wakanda's history to resurface and pull the whole country onto the astral plane for a spiritual battle. In the interim, Colin MacInnis died, apparently of a stroke, but Nathan would later be shocked and furious to discover that the stroke had been induced telekinetically.

Taygetos

While in Washington for a series of Elpis-related meetings, Nathan stopped in at the Mistra memorial in Arlington, only to encounter a face from the past - Carly Alvarez, a telepathic Mistra operative who had supposedly been killed years before. With both ex-operatives wary of each other, the conversation descended into mutual suspicion, and then got worse as Carly attacked Nathan, the mental contact revealing that she'd had Askani training. Correctly guessing her to be Trask's mysterious telepath, Nathan tried to defend himself but the shield weakness he'd been struggling with for months put him at a disadvantage. Carly knocked him out and wiped his memory, leaving him with no recollection of the encounter. His shields, however, underwent a miraculous recovery afterwards, leading Nathan to conclude that he had to work on his issues regarding combat uses of telepathy.

Not long afterwards, SHIELD approached the X-Men, looking for help in investigating a mysterious research facility in Alaska and a program called Taygetos, possibly linked to Mistra. Nathan was part of the X-Men team that accompanied the SHIELD group to check out the abandoned facility, where they discovered evidence that the work being done had involved manipulation of the genetics of mutant infants. While there, they were attacked by Tara Trask's people, apparently in alliance with John Lense, who had, unbeknownst to the X-Men, been recruited by Sebastian Shaw as his new Black Knight. During the fight, Trask made off with key evidence about Taygetos, and in a fight with Saidullayev and Lense, Nathan was nearly killed. His injuries left him in a coma for weeks, but also led to the recovery of some lost memories - specifically, those that revealed that Trask had been involved with Nathan's uncle Gideon in the past, explaining the particular bent of her philosophy.

Nathan's convalescence from his injuries was lengthy. While he was still less mobile, he encouraged Angelo to attend an exhibition by a mutant-friendly organization from Brazil, Alvorecer Novo, in Central Park. Angelo went, taking a few of the students with him, only to wind up in the middle of an assassination attempt against the group's leader, Mariana Machado. The attackers were revealed to be young, military-trained mutants in their mid-teens - just old enough to have been 'products' of the Taygetos facility. One young assassin was killed in the ensuing fight with the X-Men, and Nathan asked Jean to check his body for tattoos. When it was revealed that the young man was wearing the same alpha-omega brand that Mistra operatives had once been given, Nathan very quietly set about using Elpis's resources and contacts - the organization having spent most of the past year investigating the use of mutant child soldiers world-wide - to seek out more answers to the Taygetos mystery.

Growing increasingly fixated on the issue, Nathan made use of some of MacInnis's old contacts, threatening one former Mistra staff member to force him to dig up information on Taygetos. He was distracted from the mystery by the events in Manhattan, where he took on a command-and-control role with the X-Men teams sent into the chaos. The revelation that the Horseman Death was in fact a mind-controlled Alison Blaire sent Nathan into a brief emotional tailspin after the situation was resolved, leading him to close the Elpis office for the time being.

The return to the mansion of Jean-Paul Beaubier, an old friend, lifted his spirits, and when Callery provided the possibility of new information about Taygetos, he immediately involved himself in the situation. Attending a Hellfire Club function with Emma Frost, he retrieved more details about a new assassination attempt against T'Challa in Wakanda. With Jean, he led a team there, only to be caught up in a minor war as Trask 'convinced' troops belonging to Wakanda's neighbors to cross the borders. The X-Men managed to succeed in their mission, however, saving T'Challa and taking two young Taygetos operatives prisoner, while managing to help stave off disaster in the Wakandan capital and conclusively defeat Ilyas Saidullayev. To do the latter, however, Nathan and Jean accidentally linked minds in an unprecedented and dangerously complete fashion, and needed Emma's intervention to be untangled.

Not long after, Nathan was convinced by Nick Fury to test the Trojan Horse, both on a captive Taygetos operative and at a training facility SHIELD had discovered. When it came to the latter, he lost his nerve, and the SHIELD team he was accompanying was ambushed. Nathan was taken captive, and interrogated; the surviving SHIELD agents and the young operatives were used as leverage by the man in charge, who identified himself only as 'Alpha'. Upon discovering the nature of the Trojan Horse, he ordered Nathan and all the young operatives gunned down, then blew up the facility around them as he and his people retreated. Nathan survived only by chance, but was left emotionally shattered by the experience, suffering from renewed PTSD symptoms and doubting his place with the X-Men.

During his recovery, Nathan traveled to Morocco on Elpis business, and was nearly kidnapped by people working for Trask, who wanted to take him 'someplace safe' to protect him from Taygetos. He was saved only by the intervention of Malachi Hark and Irene Merryweather, two mutants with a connection to his mother. Troubled both by the specter of his family and the apparently ongoing threat to his safety, Nathan focused on carrying on with his life - as safely as possible.

Unfortunately, in the process of stopping a joint attack on Budapest by the Preservers and Trask's people, Nathan contributed to the gutting of her organization, with Amber Hunt, Carly Alvarez, and many of her people captured by the Hungarian authorities. This led Trask to change her attitude towards him, joining forces with Alpha in the latter's quest to end the threat posed by the Trojan Horse. This culminated in an attack against Nathan while he was in Moldova with Jean-Paul on an Elpis trip. While Nathan was accidentally teleported away by one of the operatives, Jean-Paul was captured and given to one of the Taygetos telepaths to turn into a weapon against Nathan, to be used during the inevitable rescue attempt. Jean-Paul suffered a psychotic break shortly before the X-Men arrived and killed everyone in the safehouse, including the young operatives who had taken part in his capture. Although he was brought back to the mansion, the damage to his mind was severe, and Nathan wrestled with profound guilt as he tried to help his friend in his recovery. The discovery of a Taygetos server room at the site of the safehouse, providing invaluable intelligence, was not much consolation.

It was this guilt, perhaps, that encouraged him to take advantage of new information provided by Mariana Machado and devise to plan to take down Taygetos once and for all. Working with Scott, Ororo, Jean and the Professor, he allowed himself to be captured, exploiting Alpha's desire to reverse-engineer the Trojan Horse and use it to bulletproof the Taygetos conditioning. Jean led an X-Man team to rescue him, and when the memory blocks hiding his knowledge of the plan were removed, Nathan took the location of Taygetos's fall-back position (most of its safehouses having been abandoned after its servers were handed over to SHIELD) from the mind of the telempath who had been torturing him. The X-Men deployed to Wyoming, where Nathan planned to use the Trojan Horse to incapacitate the young operatives and allow the team to take the program staff into custody. Though Trask's interference complicated the plan - she drove the young operatives into a homicidal rage that briefly counteracted the Trojan Horse, requiring the X-Men to engage them hand-to-hand - she was defeated and the Trojan Horse was successfully deployed.

Though the threat of Taygetos itself was finally ended, the X-Men discovered two days later that not all the loose ends were tied up. When a Taygetos creche was found in Northern California, SHIELD asked Jean and Moira to assess the infants found on-site. No sooner had the two doctors established that the babies had been the victims of both initial conditioning and genetic experimentation than John Lense arrived with a group of hired mercenaries to take them and the facility records, presumably to begin the program elsewhere under the auspices of the Hellfire Club. In the subsequent fighting, Carly Alvarez, who had been helping SHIELD was killed by Lense, who then turned his attention to Nathan. The two ex-Mistra operatives fought until Lense was killed and Nathan was critically injured.

New Worlds

In the aftermath of the battle with Lense and the events of the final operation against Taygetos, facing a lengthy (and likely less-than-full) convalescence, Nathan made the difficult decision that his active career with the X-Men needed to come to an end. He came to an agreement with Scott that he would remain as a reserve member of the team, and lend his experience and expertise to the team's training program once he had recovered enough to allow him to do so. When that occurred, he relocated to the new Elpis office in New York, shuttling between there and Muir.

Tragedy struck in June 2012, when, as 'punishment' for Moira's role in offering asylum to two Genoshan teens, their daughter, Rachel was kidnapped and put through the mutate process. It appeared she did not survive the process, her powers burning out her physical body. Charles, wracked with guilt, gave the news to Rachel's parents. Since then, Moira and Nathan have retreated into their grief and away from the mansion entirely. Elpis, too, was a casualty of the incident, the Genoshan government announcing the arrest of several of its employees and hinting that the group was not as peaceful as it claimed. As a result, a number of countries removed permission for Elpis to operate within their borders. The new Genoshan government retracted the statement, but the damage was already done. As a result, the Elpis office in New York fired Angelo as a show of good faith, and several of the other Xavier's employees also left.

News of Rachel's "resurrection" only served to confuse things further, as it was first believed the teenaged girl was an alternate version from another timeline. This proved to be another of Essex's manipulations, and Rachel has been proved to be the psinoic imprint of Moira and Nathan's missing daughter, rescued from destruction by Essex and raised on the astral plane for his own purposes. It's all very complicated.

The End

In January 2015, Nathan and Moira were both killed when Magneto and the Brotherhood invaded Muir.

Physical Characteristics

Height: 6'4"

Weight: 245lbs

Eyes: Gray

Hair: Graying brown

Other Features: Significant number of scars of varying types.

Powers

Telekinesis:

Although Nathan is a broad-spectrum psi, his telekinesis is his primary and strongest ability. Even after his self-administered lobotomy to cure himself of the virus after The Rictor Effect, he is still an extremely powerful and experienced macro-telekinetic. With a few moments to prepare and meditate, he can lift weight equivalent to the Blackbird with little strain. He is also capable of a high level of multitasking with his telekinesis, and can control many dozens of objects on individual trajectories, again without strain. Unlike most telekinetics, he does not need to be in line-of-sight to accomplish complicated tasks. His telekinetic endurance is exceptional, the product of harsh training at Mistra and a quarter-century of combat experience. His telekinesis is so well-trained that it has become second-nature, and works on the instinctive level as well as under Nathan's conscious direction.

Early in 2006, he began to use a telekinetic exoskeleton in the shape of a firebird, a trick learned from Askani. The exoskeleton itself is equivalent to Nathan's most durable telekinetic shield, and can withstand both projectiles and energy assault. It permits him to fly, although not gracefully, and his top speed is generally 50-60mph; the exoskeleton has occasionally been referred to by other X-Men as a "flying tank", an apt description. All of his 'lifting' ability is channeled through the exoskeleton, as demonstrated in San Diego when he briefly kept the oil rig Magneto had levitated to use as a temporary base of operations from sinking again. The one major drawback of the exoskeleton is that Nathan is unable to use his telekinesis independently on any significant level while wearing it.

Prior to San Diego Nathan was also capable of micro-telekinesis, but the brain damage and psionic scarring have left him unable to access that level of his ability, perhaps permanently. He is however still able to see what he calls 'lines of force', potential and active kinetic energy in the world around him.

Telepathy:

Nathan is best-defined as a medium-range, communications-oriented telepath. His working range is around 100 miles, although he's capable of sensing (if not directly communicating with) more distant minds. His telepathy was very poorly trained prior to coming to the mansion, a deliberate choice on the part of Mistra; he used it mostly as an early warning system, and consequently had extremely poor shields.

Years of working on a weekly basis with Charles Xavier and much subconscious training from Askani have solved that problem, but Nathan continues to be somewhat uneasy with his telepathy. He remains particularly sensitive to stray thoughts, and is often unwilling to exercise the active telepathic techniques available to him because of his experiences with Mistra. He is capable of the telepathic switchboard and has used it on a number of X-Men missions, but has some difficulty maintaining his focus on his surroundings when he does so. Despite his own talent for languages, he rarely if ever uses his telepathy to augment fluency in himself or in others.

Precognition:

Nathan possessed a secondary mutation that developed in his early 20s – a narrowly focused form of precognition locked on the Askani, a clan living two thousand years in the future and engaged in a fierce war for survival. His precognition, unlike that of Marie-Ange Colbert, manifested much more like a cross-temporal telepathic link - first with various Askani, then with future versions of himself. This precognitive link allowed him to play host to their astral selves for a time. It was broken with the Mother Askani's 'death' during the events of Lost In The Woods. His precognition appeared burnt out for some time, but later refocused on his uncle Gideon, who played a significant role in the chain of events leading to the Askani's future. After the final confrontation with his uncle, Nathan's precognition vanished once more, and according to Askani, permanently. Her parting words left Nathan believing that his precognition had been artificially induced, to allow him to play a specific role in the course of events. He has however accepted that with the disappearance of the Askani's future, he may never know the truth.

Miscellaneous:

While he played host to the Askani Nathan was also capable of manifesting the psionic ghosts in a form visible to the people around him. The nature of this ability was never defined, although it may combine elements of both telekinesis and telepathy. As it was never done consciously, how Nathan managed it remains a mystery.

Equipment

Nathan uses a psimitar, a psionic amplifier built for him by Forge adapting an Askani design. It resembles a medieval halberd.

External Links

Phase 1

xp_communication posts

Trivia

Nathan is a talented linguist, speaking over fifteen languages fluently, and has varying degrees of competence in close to twenty others. His gift for languages is assisted by his telepathy, but not dependent on it, and he devotes the bulk of his infrequent spare time to studying additional languages needed in his Elpis work.

He began writing poetry during his year spent undercover in Kazakhstan. While he considered it a dirty little secret (or perhaps just a very private pastime) for nearly twenty years, recently he has started to make some effort to share it with a wider audience.

Plots

2012

Genosha Arc referenced only