Start of an X-Men story (Patreon)

There was one house that did not fit into the rarefied Old World aesthetic of the Xavier Institute, a carefully calculated classicalism that had persisted through rebuilding and redesigns. At one wing of the X-shaped mansion—the one in which Scott Summers’s room was located—there was an exterior door that opened up onto a covered walkway of neat white planks. This led, with modest curving, a little ways into the woods of the Xavier estate’s grounds, into a clearing where the walkway stopped upon the porch of a cottage.

This cottage was not as quaint as the name would suggest. It had been designed in a neomodernist style, resembling nothing so much as a diamond within the cultivated setting of the well-manicured and cleared lawn. Inside the cottage were miniatures of all the mansion offered—an espresso machine, a refrigerator, all the sundry services a house was meant to provide except for laundry. There was still a chute for that, and a man who delivered it cleaned and folded back to the cottage’s occupants.

(The chute did not go back to the mansion and its laundry, but to a locked cache outside where a man would come with a key, load the laundry into a van, and take it to be serviced with the utmost care well away from the mansion’s famous dangers. Some of the idle rich pampered their pets. Emma Frost instead indulged her fashion.)

The cottage—with its frosted glass walls, its privacy, its quiet, and its dignity—was Emma Frost’s. She lived in it with the Stepford Cuckoos; her daughters in a funny sort of way. Their actual education was an ongoing issue between her and Scott, but in general, the classes that the Cuckoos did not feel an affinity with were not attended, with them instead getting the learning experience of being Emma Frost’s coterie. They kept her schedule, maintained her hair, buffed her nails, and took her phone calls. Emma saw secretarial work as an underrated, thought soft, method of career advancement. All the best dirt was available to a good secretary. It was the second best way to blackmail someone, besides actually being a stripper herself. Emma couldn’t recommend this, despite its net positive for her. The music now was simply intolerable.

The cottage was two stories—the ‘cottage’ name being a complete misnomer picked by the X-Men because it could usually be count on to put a line in Emma’s forehead—and the top floor, or attic, was taken up by five beds, among other, more superfluous accoutrements to a girl’s bedroom. As it was dusk, the Stepford Cuckoos were preparing for bed. (Not Scott’s bed, either, as Emma was doing.) They filed up the stairs, sighed as one to find that the staff had once more separated their beds in changing the sheets. They pushed the beds together, changed into their nightgowns, and after each girl’s own beauty ritual had been performed, they fell asleep in a pile that stretched across all the conjoined beds.

As with everyone else, the Cuckoos dreamed, their subconscious processing the events of the day into long-term memory, instincts, phobias, and other necessary ingredients to consciousness. Unlike everyone else, the Cuckoos were quite aware of this process, and as they slept, their hive mind communed with itself, each of the five relaying what little had gone on that day without the other four’s knowledge.