Murder at Manson

• Writer - Grant Morrison

whodunit

Summary

  Note: this is Murder at the Mansion part 3.

  Lucas finds Sage lying in the woods, mumbling nonsense. He finds her acupressure point and reboots. She's fine but has lost gigabytes of data from her brain. She remembers the shack, and she and Lucas find the cocoons inside; Sage says they're probably eggs, and she wishes they hadn't got involved: Emma always equals trouble, even in death. Meanwhile, Lucas finds the gun.

  Xavier and Hank tell Beak they know he didn't shoot Emma and ask if Angel did it. Beak, frantic, insists he did it to hide the fact he "made Angel pregnant with monster babies." That surprises Hank, and it surprised Beak to learn there's only five days twixt sex and babies: Angel's a literal fly girl, and she said they'd be expelled if anyone knew. Xavier reassures him they're valued students; Hank wants to know where Angel is.

  Lucas and Sage arrive with the murder weapon, customized to kill Emma. He says there are life forms in a shack; Beak insists they mustn't go there; Xavier says Logan built it and spent a bad winter there; Sage wonders if Angel attacked her to protect her larvae; Hank wonders what offspring two mutants with radical morphology might have.

  While Xavier leads the others to the woods, Hank continues to reassemble Emma. Jean tells him it's impossible; Hank says she really upset Emma and should have fixed her own marriage; Jean jokes she was distracted saving the world, and she hands him Emma's lips. Hank still thinks he's a suspect and insists he was at Orfeo; Jean reminds him the Cuckoos are trained telepaths, who must have manipulated him: the opera was cancelled that night. She senses Emma's consciousness in the remains.

  Xorn vouches for Angel and Beak; Xavier agrees but says even the best people will do terrible things to protect secrets. Sage has found a broken cocoon outside the shack: the "brood" has hatched; Lucas warns her about that word (cf. X-Men I:162). He leads the way in; they find Angel there, happy amongst her babies, some already flying angelically. Beak is relieved they're not monsters; Angel wants to name them after the Jacksons (LaToya Bohusk?) and says the one in her lap is as cute and useless as his father.

  Lucas tells Angel they have the gun; she admits she did it but doesn't entirely know why; Xavier deduces she was mind-controlled.

  The Cuckoos try to convince Esme not to leave them, as she drags her trunk down the hallway, but she plans to dye her hair and "scrawl her name across the world."

  Jean manifests the Phoenix, and Hank shields his eyes. She knows everybody's worried she's going to become a cosmic destroyer, but although she has trouble with the rushes, she's okay. She says Emma's been disembodied before and tries to fuse her molecules back together; she asks Hank to think of a pink door opening and reads the biology from his mind. She realizes Emma has actually fallen in love with Scott and thinks it's funny. She tells her to wake up, Scott needs her, and she revives, still in diamond form, yelling, "Esme!"

  Lucas stops Esme at the gate, saying there's a curfew, but she's not wasting her summer while they try to solve the crime; Sage says they already did, and it wasn't hard. Esme used Kick to overwhelm her sisters; when Sophie resisted, she steered her toward death, and she used Angel to kill Emma, but why?

  Esme says Emma only loved herself and wanted them to be like her. Lucas isn't convinced and suspects someone bigger is behind all this; he asks who Esme's going to meet. Esme says, "if you only knew," and telepathically attacks, shutting them both down. Esme opens the gate and strolls out to a driverless taxi.

  Xavier gets them out of the trance; Sage's memories are finally returning, and she can remember the smell of pines, sweat, and male pheromones. A tall man attacked her (last iss.). Lucas immediately asks where Scott is.

Summary

  Cover name was changed to "New X-Men" for Issues 114 - 156.