Biography - Page 4
In truth, Sinister had no vulnerability to Scott’s powers. By this point, Essex knew he had grown too prominent in the X-Men’s rogues gallery and had to fake his death in order to deter them from pursuing him any further. Nathan Christopher seemed secure in the hands of his father and blood-mother Jean Grey, so for a time Sinister would merely watch and plan. Mister Sinister allowed the Children of X to believe him dead for many months, content to return to the background to carry out his scheming. Perhaps this is also why Sinister stopped employing the Marauders for awhile, in order to avoid announcing his continued existence with such obvious pawns of the past. He still retained access to the genetic sequences of most of the Marauders in his clone farms, although the astral Malice and regenerative Sabretooth remained elusive originals. Instead, Mister Sinister gathered a new team of agents known as the Nasty Boys. These mutants were criminals and delinquents instead of the hardened killers found in the Marauders: thugs not assassins.
Circumstances would arise that pressed Sinister into exposing himself. He became aware of a mutant senator named Steven Shaffran with dreams of taking the White House. Shaffran, nicknamed “Ricochet,” had an event manipulation power that subtly turned his opponents against 
themselves in various ways once he focused on them. Senator Shaffran had chosen the new government-sponsored mutant team X-Factor as a political target to rally around for his own benefit. Ricochet saw the value of an alliance with Sinister and his Nasty Boys, but Essex secretly intended to sabotage Shaffran’s plans. X-Factor was led by Havok and Polaris (now freed of Malice), and Sinister couldn’t allow Shaffran to get them killed until his own plans for the two were satisfied.
Still, Mister Sinister worked with Senator Shaffran to string him along in his plot. He allowed Slab and his other Nasty Boys to move against X-Factor at Shaffran’s direction. Ricochet’s power cultivated a rogue duplicate personality from X-Factor’s Multiple Man into gaining prominence, undermining X-Factor’s faith in its own members. The rogue claimed he was the real Jamie Madrox and X-Factor had recruited one of HIS rogue duplicates by mistake. When government liaison Val Cooper called in a polygraph expert, her ex-husband Edmond Atkinson, Sinister posed as Edmond and supported the rogue’s version of events through testing. After what seemed like independent confirmation of the rogue’s story from Moira MacTaggert as well, the real Jamie seemingly gave up and allowed the rogue duplicate to absorb him and become the new Madrox-Prime.
When the rogue Multiple Man returned to Mister Sinister and the Nasty Boys, however, the dupe realized he had been duped. Jamie-Prime could not be absorbed by a duplicate like this, and instead he broke down and absorbed the renegade from the inside, reasserting himself and reclaiming the memories this dupe had blocked from his mind. Madrox encountered Sinister directly before fleeing to reconnect with X-Factor at the Capitol and reveal Shaffran’s schemes. Sinister dispatched the Nasty Boys to make a show of battling X-Factor on the Great Lawn before replacing Shaffran himself. As the Senator, Mister Sinister made a public show of mutant abilities and megalomania, redeeming X-Factor and thoroughly discrediting Ricochet. Sinister returned to 
where he had tied up Shaffran and explained why he thwarted his partner’s schemes. He gave the ruined Senator a gun and suggested he kill himself. Senator Shaffran tried to turn the gun on Sinister, but the ricochet off of Sinister’s armored frame meant the result was the same: Shaffran was neutralized and Sinister’s plans and pawns remained in play. [X-Factor (1st series) #71-75] The one drawback for Essex was exposure, as Multiple Man soon alerted X-Factor (and through them, the X-Men) of his survival. [X-Factor (1st series) #77]
Some of Mister Sinister’s Nasty Boys were rescued from government custody by Stryfe and his Mutant Liberation Front. Retrieving the Nasty Boys from Stryfe opened a dialogue between the two villains. [X-Factor (1st series) #77-78] Behind the scenes, Stryfe apparently shared some intriguing information with Sinister. Months earlier, while Sinister was in hiding, Apocalypse had seemingly countered all of Essex’s scheming with the Grey-Summers bloodline by infecting Nathan Christopher with a techno-organic virus. This T-O virus would have proven fatal for the young mutant if Cyclops and Jean Grey hadn’t allowed a time-traveler from the Sisterhood of the Askani to take the boy into the future for treatment, never to return. [X-Factor (1st series) #68] In fact, Stryfe and his arch-nemesis, X-Force’s leader Cable, were the future incarnations of Nathan Christopher. One was the original and the other was a genetically-engineered clone created during the Askani’s treatment of the virus.
Intrigued by this information, Mister Sinister was willing to play a part in Stryfe’s upcoming schemes against the X-Men. Ironically, Stryfe had been raised by the future version of Apocalypse in his timeline and he blamed Scott Summers and Jean Grey for abandoning him to that fate. With Apocalypse back in hibernation after X-Factor’s last encounter with him, Mister Sinister used his 
shape-changing abilities to pose as the Eternal One and direct his Horsemen to capture Cyclops and Jean Grey, obscuring the true players in this drama. Sinister then delivered Scott and Jean to Stryfe, in exchange for a genetic matrix mapping the future of the Grey-Summers gene sequence, quite a prize for Sinister’s research.
Still, Mister Sinister knew his agenda and Stryfe’s would be at odds in the long-term, so he made efforts to undermine the MLF leader’s plans once he had his matrix. Stryfe had kicked off his agenda by posing as Cable and shooting Charles Xavier at a concert, leaving him infected with a techno-organic virus from the future. Sinister visited the X-Mansion himself to put the X-Men on Stryfe’s trail, while leaving a holographic recording for the X-Men unit hunting the Horsemen on 
Apocalypse’s path. Mister Sinister (more than anyone) knew Apocalypse’s present state of death would be temporary, and that the Eternal One would be best suited to save Xavier’s life from a virus Stryfe surely cultivated with Apocalypse’s technology. Or perhaps Apocalypse and the X-Men would kill each other instead of working together. Either way, Sinister profited. [X-Cutioner’s Song crossover]
Stryfe had the last laugh, however. Sinister must have been greatly displeased with the end of the X-Cutioner's Song conflict. The coveted Summers genetic matrix was a sham and both clone and original of his prized union seemed to be dead. Apocalypse being temporarily dead again was hardly a consolation. Even worse, the unlocked genetic matrix seemingly unleashed the Legacy Virus, a plague on mutantkind engineered by Stryfe in the event of his downfall. Sinister’s geneticist, Gordon Lefferts, was but the first to fall ill and die thanks to the Legacy Virus. Faced with unexpected consequences and an uncertain future, Mister Sinister decided on an unusual tactic… honesty.
In the guise of Mike Milbury, Sinister had been a remote neighbor to Philip and Deborah Summers in Alaska for many years, keeping tabs on the Summers bloodline. Scott Summers visited his grandparents in an effort to explain the final fate of Nathan Christopher, and Milbury revealed himself to Scott. Face-to-face for the first time since Inferno, Mister Sinister allowed Cyclops to blast him again with his optic beam to prove his previous death had been a sham. Once that was 
out of Scott’s system, Essex detailed how he had been duped by Stryfe into unleashing the Legacy Virus on Earth. Sinister was open about his concerns as, selfishly speaking, mutants suddenly dropping dead would not factor well into his own plans. He even briefly stood side-by-side with Cyclops against the Dark Riders, leaving with a warning to the Riders that Summers should not be killed under any circumstances. [X-Men (2nd series) #22-23]
Mister Sinister remained on his back foot for many months, as unexpected developments and the schemes of others continued to throw a spanner into his own plans. Sinister had been monitoring the Shi’ar agent Eric the Red for some time and was aware of a young man named Adam-X the X-Treme, who was the genetically-engineered half-Shi’ar brother of Cyclops and Havok. Curious what the aliens had done with his favored bloodline, Sinister used his Milbury identity to hire the assassin Arcade to test X-Treme in his Murderworld arena. Sinister also hung a carrot in front of Scott about his “brothers” when they met, but Scott ultimately didn’t bite. [X-Men (2nd series) #39, X-Force (1st series) #29-30]
Sinister’s concerns over the Legacy Virus had him working parallel to the X-Men’s own interests, and they crossed paths. In Los Angeles, he (as Milbury again) took a blood sample from the infected mutant Infectia right under the X-Men’s collective noses. Infectia had been in the area looking for treatment from Gordon Lefferts, and the X-Men tracked down the geneticist’s laboratory. Mister Sinister was there collecting Lefferts’ data, as well as an interesting find named Threnody. A mutant girl with a form of “death empathy,” Threnody was uniquely sensitive to other 
mutants infected by the Legacy Virus. Sinister convinced a reluctant Beast that he was better suited to care for Threnody at the moment and could use her talent to greater efficiency because of his lack of scruples and morality. [X-Men (2nd series) #27] Sinister did indeed help stabilize Threnody’s mind, using cybernetic neuro-locks to give her control over her power buildup. He put her in charge of data collection and analysis for his tesseracting Forever Laboratory. She later aided the X-Men in destroying some of his research, but nothing he seemed greatly concerned about. [X-Men (2nd series) #34]
Perhaps he should have been. For while Mister Sinister himself was absent from the laboratory, a clone of Sinister was hosting a unique dinner in tesseract space, linked to the lab by an interspatial umbilical field. Sinister's "guests" were clones of Xavier, Magneto, Moira MacTaggert, Hank McCoy, and Amanda Mueller, a trick he occasionally pulled to engineer conversations that might lead to interesting revelations. However, the X-Men's intrusion and encounter with Threnody damaged the umbilical field, causing the dinner party's pocket of interspace to become untethered. While Sinister and the other guests tried to stop their clone degregation or preserve the spatial pocket, Amanda had realized early on what she was. As a jest, she gave Sinister secretly engineered data from Black Womb about a potential for homo sapiens and homo superior, dubbed homo unitus, knowing he would be unable to use it. Mister Sinister's clone tried to transmit the homo unitus data back through the lab's failing interspatial link, but he died without knowing whether the data packet made it back to Sinister Prime and the Forever Laboratory's system. [X-Men: Legends #10]
Eventually, Cable returned to the present, alive and well and Sinister embarked on a new agenda with him. Cable was the weapon that Sinister had worked so hard to produce. In order to ensure that this weapon was aimed at the proper target, Sinister decided to entice Cable to his side with the most succulent of bait: the Truth. Sinister confronted Cable and his partner, Domino, at the grave of Madelyne Pryor-Summers. Here Sinister gave Cable all of the answers he had been searching for. When all parties involved at the X-Cutioner's Song conflict learned of the lineage of Stryfe, they took Stryfe's word that he was the original, and Cable the copy. Sinister now told Cable that they were all misinformed. Sinister had deduced that the true son of Scott Summers and Madelyne Pryor was Cable. Stryfe was the clone. Sinister further revealed to Cable that the arms dealer Tolliver, who 
had given Cable so much trouble over the past, was none other than Cable's own son, Tyler. As a parting gesture, Sinister unleashed the dormant Stryfe personality within Cable, where his clone’s mind had secretly resided since their last encounter. Although Stryfe temporarily caused trouble for Cable and his parents again, releasing Stryfe only gave the Summers and Grey clan the opportunity to expunge him from Cable’s mind once and for all. [Cable (2nd series) #6-8]
Once, Mister Sinister hired Siena Blaze through the Gamesmaster to acquire the DNA mapping of the dangerous mutant Proteus from Muir Island. Yet she failed to do the job, as she had a run in with Excalibur. At first Sinister was very annoyed, but his mood changed when he learned that during the fight Siena scratched the face of Phoenix, aka Rachel Summers. From below Siena‘s fingernails, Sinister gathered some cells of Rachel and has gained a possibly more valuable prize than he originally wanted – samples from another variant of the Grey-Summers line. [Excalibur (1st series) #72-74]
While building his own resource base, Sinister also continued to monitor his existing assets. Malice had finally separated from Polaris and released her months earlier. Claustrophobic at the idea of being trapped in a single body, Malice tried to have Lorna Dane killed so that Sinister couldn’t force her to claim Polaris again. After an indirect scheme failed, she possessed Havok and attacked Polaris directly. This only drew out the attention of Sinister and his Nasty Boys. Mister Sinister intimidated Malice into doing his bidding and trying to possess Lorna, but Alex held back and tried to prevent Malice from leaving him to protect Polaris. Sinister then stepped in and 
seemingly destroyed Malice as she was caught between their two minds, all in the name of protecting his favored pawns. [X-Factor (1st series) #103-105] Mister Sinister also confronted Gambit as the X-Men drew closer to learning Remy LeBeau’s secret history with the Marauders. He reminded the Cajun that his debts were not fully paid before vanishing through his tesseract once more, leaving Gambit unsettled. [Uncanny X-Men (1st series) #325, X-Men (2nd series) #45]
Cable’s son Tyler emerged as Genesis, trying to declare himself the next heir to Apocalypse. As a result, he saw Sinister as a potential rival and attempted to manipulate Essex. The greatly aged Faye Livingstone was detached from reality and cared for in an assisted living facility where Essex still visited her from time to time. Genesis learned of this and believed he had discovered an Achilles’ heel for Sinister. He kidnapped Faye and used Apocalypse’s machinery to restore her to the age when she knew Nathan Essex. It was a test to see if he could provoke sympathy or genuine emotion from Mister Sinister, a trait both men saw as a weakness. Genesis also drew 
Jean Grey and Beast into the mix, using Jean’s telepathy to link their minds so Faye and Essex could communicate. Faye had a kind mental reunion with Nathan but told him she never married or had children to prevent him from harvesting her genetic potential, and died peacefully in his arms. Sinister gave no sign he cared, and Genesis retreated to face Sinister another day. Hank McCoy, on the other hand, saw something in Sinister’s eyes, though he knew the man would never admit it. [X-Men Annual ‘95]
Several new elements came to Mister Sinister’s attention in the weeks that followed. Like the Morlocks, Sinister had long suspected his own work had been used in the Genoshan Mutate engineering process. With Genosha fallen into civil war, Essex made contact with the rebels Jenny Ransome and Philip Moreau, son of the Genegineer who supposed invented the process 
decades earlier. In order to find the power behind the throne, Sinister guided Moreau and Ransome towards certain revelations while also arranging for Cable and Domino to appear on the war-ravaged island. They uncovered a hidden laboratory in the Ridgeback Mountains run by Sugarman, a mutant unknown to Sinister who was also a deranged geneticist with equipment based on Sinister’s work. Sugarman fled Genosha, and Mister Sinister was free to reclaim the technology derived from his work that created the Mutate process. [Cable (1st series) #26-28]
Through Sugarman, Mister Sinister became aware of Nate Grey, the son of Cyclops and Jean Grey engineered by the divergent Sinister in the parallel reality that Sugarman called home, the Age of Apocalypse. He questioned Threnody what she knew about Nate Grey from monitoring his data network, and she claimed ignorance. In fact, Threnody chaffed under Sinister’s control and had been preparing for weeks to use Nate as her escape valve. For some reason, Sinister had abandoned the Nasty Boys by this point, but he defrosted a team of Marauders to hunt Threnody down when she finally fled his tender care. Threnody indeed found Nate Grey and he quickly became her protector. A pity Sinister was caught so completely off-guard by this, for otherwise he might have prepared… contingencies. [X-Man #12-13]