"Just you few? No one else?"
Looking around the empty, circular lecture hall, Professor Charles Xavier asked the handful of students huddled in the front row, unable to believe it.
They wore all sorts of strange metal caps. One even made Charles wonder if it had been fashioned from a cooking pot.
"P-Professor. They..."
The only female student who wasn't dressed strangely seemed to want to say something, but after hesitating again and again for a long while, she simply gave Charles a look that said, You know everything.
After the X-Men had successfully rescued a passenger plane that had made an emergency landing in downtown Brooklyn, Charles Xavier—already one of the school's most popular professors—had received an unprecedented surge of attention and admiration.
He was even more in the public eye than Elvis Presley, the brightest star of the era.
But over the past two days, some rumor had started spreading.
More and more students had begun to suspect that Professor Xavier had already pried into their private lives and secrets.
Some said that Charles had been the one to report them after they were caught breaking school rules. Others claimed they'd failed genetics because they had once badmouthed Mr. Xavier in their minds, and he'd held a grudge.
More outrageous still, one student blamed the end of his relationship on the professor supposedly putting thoughts of infidelity into his girlfriend's head. He insisted he'd never done such a thing.
Before long, the genetics class, which had once drawn so many students that even the hallway outside was packed, had become almost deserted.
The students would rather forfeit their grades than enter Charles's classroom again. The few dozen who still came were all bold, mischievous sorts.
Most treated it like a game, testing whether their homemade "blocking helmets" could