X-MEN UNITED #4
“Ancient Orc Oaken Arclight”
Writer: Eve L Ewing
Artist: Tiago Palma
Colour artist: Brian Reber
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Editor: Tom Brevoort

COVER: Cyclops and Deathdream under attack from some sort of frost monster. Not a scene from the issue.

THE X-MEN:

Iceman. His solution to the tension between Scott and Emma in issues #1-2 is to get them to play what he describes as a specially tailored version of Ancient Orc Oaken Arclight. From the sound of it this would normally be a standard issue Dungeons & Dragons style RPG, but for this purpose. Iceman seems to be a fan, though god knows who he’s been playing it with in the past. Maybe there was a regular game on Krakoa.

Somehow, he’s actually convinced Scott and Emma to play along with this, and he’s roped in Rogue and Ben Liu to help out. Nobody else seems to be quite as keen on the actual game as him, but they do seem to be on board with it as a team building exercise, with varying degrees of reluctance. The game he’s designed seems pretty generic, but then he is doing it with rookie players. It’s clearly intended as a scenario to force Scott and Emma to work together, but it doesn’t get anywhere near his intended plot points before actual monsters show up to derail things.

Emma Frost. Heaven only knows how she was talked into this, but she seems to accept the argument that something needs to be done to get her and Scott back on the same page, and seems broadly willing to go through the motions of playing along. She shows up late and has to be reminded of what they’re doing, and she doesn’t seem to have read the rules, but she claims to be willing to try and be civil. Despite that, she’s really making less of an effort than Scott, who is at least trying to play the game properly.

The NPCs in Ben’s landscape don’t register to her telepathy. When Ben can’t shut off his powers, she goes into her normal teacher mode and tries to psychically commandeer him (reasonably enough, in the circumstances), but gets repelled by something. This gives Scott an opportunity to save her from a monster, which does seem to bring her round to him a bit.

Prior to the game, she meets up with Lourdes Chantal (who wrote to her at the end of the previous issue). She assumes that Lourdes has come to ask for help, and is irritated when Lourdes lectures her about abuse of power. Lourdes’ basic theory is that Emma is obsessed with control, created Greymatter Lane in order to have a space where she controlled everything, and only helped Lourdes to escape Sebastian Shaw because she enjoyed the feeling of agency of Lourdes’ life. Emma responds by pointing out that she’s also been controlled in the past – by Sebastian Shaw in her back story, though she also cites Mr Sinister from Exceptional X-Men #10 – and claims that she saw these situations as opportunities. There is clearly something in Lourdes’ argument that Emma is a control freak, though.

Cyclops. He’s agreed to do this because Iceman asked, although he’s not happy about it, regarding it as a compromise merely to show up in Greymatter Lane at all. Nonetheless, having agreed to participate, he’s making a sincere effort to understand the game and to play it properly (and is irritated that Emma isn’t making the same effort).

Rogue. She’s supposed to be here to keep the peace between Scott and Emma, which mainly consists of yelling at them for squabbling and demanding that they play Bobby’s stupid game.

STUDENTS:

Ben Liu. Iceman has enlisted him to help create an actual psychic landscape for the game, rather than just rolling dice and using your imagination. (There’s a passing mention of Ben serving as the dice, so perhaps there was meant to be some system for him to make the dice rolls if the game had ever got that far.) All of this, unfortunately, sits rather awkwardly with X-Men, where a big part of Ben’s story arc is that he still doesn’t really understand his powers or what he can do with them, beyond the fact that he accidentally conjured up an alien invasion in X-Men #2. Being able to create this sort of landscape is miles beyond anything he’s done before. Let’s be generous and assume that, as a psychic landscape to begin with, Greymatter Lane is much, much easier for him to control.

And to be fair, it does go wrong very quickly. When monsters show up, Ben is unable to break the scenario. Emma’s attempt to commandeer his mind results in his eyes turning red as if he was possessed, and Emma being repelled – though he goes back to normal in the next panel with no apparent memory.

Deathdream. Rogue has brought him along because… well, the explanation we’re given is that “Rogue wanted one of her mentees to shadow her”, which might make sense if this was a low-stakes mission, but it’s a team-building exercise for Scott and Emma. To be honest, you have to suspect that he’s here mainly because the plot requires him, but maybe you could argue that Rogue thought that Scott and Emma might be more inclined to act civilly towards one another in front of a junior mutant who neither of them know.

As in Uncanny X-Men, Deathdream is prone to literalism and to a blasé attitude to death. When Rogue has been trapped and is suffocating to death, he’s able to use his powers to help her. Specifically, this involves him using his powers to travel to the spirit realm and then letting her absorb some of his powers so that she can then bring herself back to life. Quite how that helps her escape the bonds that she couldn’t escape before, it’s hard to tell, but apparently it gives her the surge of energy that she needs to escape.

Afterwards, he senses “another plane” encroaching, which seems to panic him. Moments later, he fades away into nothingness.

VILLAINS:

Lourdes Chantal. It’s open to interpretation whether Lourdes is meant to be a villain here, but Emma certainly takes her to be making threats.

By way of recap, Lourdes Chantal was originally a one-off character from a back-up strip in Classic X-Men #7, who was killed by the Sentinels. In Marauders #21-22, this was retconned so that Lourdes was in an abusive relationship with Sebastian Shaw, and Emma rescued her by faking her death during the Sentinel attack, then offering her services to Wilson Fisk, to set her up with a new life. Chantal now regards this as something that Emma did at least in large part to show her own control over the situation (and over Chantal in particular), and accuses Emma of being more like Sebastian Shaw than she cares to admit.

Chantal claims to have come with a warning that Emma’s abuses of power are being watched by people “who would make dire foes”, which Emma brushes off. Chantal seems to be working with two other women who we don’t see clearly, and who have an even lower opinion of Emma than she does.