"And then it got worse. Laurie's mom smacked me for offering condolences. Then my parents decided the only place I would be safe would be staying at the school. Sofia left, and just like that I was the only human and more than a few mutant classmates turned even colder. I was a flat scan, a baseline."

He had already been torn down in his life for being black, for figure skating, for being a mutant, for having a non-active power. Now being thrown out of the community he knew? Fuck that had hurt.

"The purifiers then attacked the school. I took a bullet in the shoulder to protect some people. Josh... found the other half of his powers. And at last we come to the bad part. Turns out something happened in that reality that was created. A person that should have been dead was brought back to life, and had been close to me. A person that as a girl had been kidnapped by a demon, intending to use her to create a deadly weapon called a Soul Sword. That history doesn't matter. The fact that after she was gone for years did, and that the Demon Lord Belasco, ruler of the hell dimension of Limbo, could smell her on me and two others."