Biography - Page 6
Somehow, Mister Sinister knew of the coming of the mutant child whose birth signaled the undoing of the Decimation spell. He re-assembled the Marauders and planned to control the future of mutantkind. Sinister added to his Marauders with Mystique (who knew the child was necessary to save her daughter, Rogue, from her out-of-control powers) and the former Horsemen Sunfire and Gambit (who needed his help to extricate themselves from Apocalypse’s influence). Mister Sinister also used his knowledge and resources to compel an alliance with Exodus and his reformed Acolytes. [X-Men (2nd series) #187, 200, Annual #1]
To ensure a monopoly on his knowledge of the future, Sinister had the Marauders quietly begin eliminating time-travelers, precognitives, extra-dimensionals and other sources of future information. His intent was specifically to blind the X-Men, so they were behind the curve when the moment came. Cable, Gateway, the Witness, Quiet Bill, Vargas and others fell before the Marauders. Mystique, Lady Mastermind and the Malice-possessed Omega Sentinel also betrayed the X-Men from within. They recovered the comatose Rogue for Mystique and tried to wipe out the Destiny Diaries as well, in preparation for the endgame. [X-Men (2nd series) #200-203]
When the time came, the Marauders rushed to Cooperstown, Alaska to retrieve the new mutant birth, but they were not alone. Cable of the X-Men and the anti-mutant Purifiers also had knowledge of the future, making it a race to the hospital. Despite Sinister’s efforts to blind the X-Men, Cable survived the ambushes and managed to escape with the baby. The Marauders and Acolytes regrouped at Sinister’s base in the Dominion Range, Antarctica to plan their next move. Surprisingly, an X-Men strike team attacked the base, looking for the baby. Sinister gleefully realized this meant Nathan was on his own, operating without back-up or the X-Men’s support.
Sinister reasoned that a time-traveler like Cable would have already left the time period with his precious cargo if possible, meaning Cable currently could not time travel. Extrapolating ahead, he sent the Marauders to Forge’s Eagle Plaza, the most likely place Cable would go to repair or replace his time machine. While his agents were in the field, Sinister relocated to Muir Island to have access to the equipment necessary for his work on the child. Mister Sinister was not 
destined to see the end of the Marauders’ quest, however. He let his guard down around Mystique, who wrestled him off-balance long enough to force Sinister into contact with Rogue. Rogue’s touch was instantly lethal at this stage of her powers, even to one like Sinister, and Essex’s mind was ripped from him, leaving him brain dead. [Messiah CompleX crossover]
Nevertheless, Mister Sinister would not be claimed so easily by death. Project: Cronus, set into motion decades ago at Alamogordo, became active. On a repeating cycle, the Cronus Machine attempted to transplant Sinister’s constantly updated and preserved mind into the genetically-prepared children of his old associates. Time had created variables Sinister hadn’t anticipated when he first encoded his mind into Xavier, Shaw, Marko and Ryking, however. The Decimation removed Carter Ryking’s X-Gene, causing him to die rather than prove a strong enough host for Sinister’s consciousness. The mystical helmet of the Juggernaut protected Cain Marko from Cronus and Jacob Shaw had been shrewd enough to develop his own mechanical defense against the process for his son, Sebastian. The defensive apparatus exploded and killed two men at the Hellfire Club, alerting Sebastian that his father’s decades-old warning had been real.
Furthermore, Amanda Mueller had become wise to Essex’s plot, and administered the Cronus treatment to herself. Immortal but still aging, Mueller was desperate to escape the confines of her 
own body. She modified Cronus to give her the power and vitality of Sinister without his personality, and wanted the other candidates eliminated so that the machine settled on her. Despite her efforts, the Cronus Device managed to trigger Sinister’s active mind and powers in a weakened Charles Xavier. Sinister healed Charles of the injuries Amanda had inflicted on him and struck out at his former associate. Trying to psychically overwrite the most powerful telepath in the world was perhaps too bold, though, even for Sinister. Xavier fought back and managed to cleanse himself of Sinister’s influence, while his allies Sebastian Shaw and Gambit destroyed the Cronus Machine to prevent any further assaults on their minds. [X-Men: Legacy (1st series) #210-214]
Cronus had been one of Sinister’s earliest attempts at immortality, but it was hardly his last. Later schemes that had been set in motion as redundancies also continued to flourish. A woman named Claudine Renko had been prepared by Essex, implanted with a genetic virus that triggered after Cronus failed. Sebastian Shaw found her after the Cronus affair and made an alliance with “Miss Sinister.” [X-Men: Legacy (1st series) #214]
At first, Claudine seemed to get all the perks of being Sinister with none of the drawbacks. She gained some of his scientific knowledge and memories, access to his powers (particularly telepathy), while retaining her own independent mind. After being injured by Daken, however, Miss Sinister began feeling compulsions which led her to one of Essex’s old bases. She entered a device intended to fully reincarnate Nathaniel Essex in her body. Claudine resisted and separated from the device before it was finished, but she began slowly losing her mind and body to Essex 
after that. Claudine attempted to transfer her mind into the body of X-23 to escape her fate, but instead Sinister’s mind seized X-23’s body for himself. X-23’s healing factor and iron will allowed her to expel Sinister, leaving both her and Claudine seemingly free of Essex’s influence. However, another clone from Essex’s lab named Alice appeared to possess Sinister’s essence as this adventure came to a close. [X-23 (2nd series) #4-6]
Whether through Alice or some other failsafe scenario, Mister Sinister did eventually regain his own mind and body, totally independent of Claudine Renko. Sinister became dedicated to a 
process of progressive personal evolution, using his creation engines to clone and re-clone himself towards the goal of absolute perfection. Through trial and error, whenever a flaw was discovered, a new Sinister would be cloned with minor corrections in his physiology or personality matrix to eliminate that flaw. In this manner, Mister Sinister honed a predictive intellect, allowing him to perfectly anticipate the schism between Cyclops and Wolverine’s X-Men by crafting a version of Sinister who could guess the outcome in advance. [Uncanny X-Men (1st series) #544]
Satisfied that he had achieved perfection (or near enough), Sinister made plans to propagate himself. The Dreaming Celestial had taken up residence in the hills near San Francisco where the X-Men lived, a two-thousand-foot colossus of cosmic evolutionary might. Sinister prepared his technology (Celestial-derived itself, having been passed down from Apocalypse’s Celestial Ship) to suborn the Dreaming Celestial for his own purposes. He seized control of the Dreaming Celestial’s head, separating it from its shoulders and bringing it down at the Palace of Fine Arts. The cosmic power of the Celestial was fed into Sinister’s creation engines, allowing him to mass-produce genetically extrapolated versions of himself. Here, Essex began his new motto “Sinister is a system, Sinister is a species.”
Of course, the X-Men took offense to his actions, but Sinister was prepared. Among the various modifications he had made to his “design” were greater telepathic abilities, a brilliant strategic and tactical mind based on Cyclops himself, as well as hive-mind architecture derived from the 
Phalanx. This created a perfectly-coordinated army of Sinister clones guided by his military genius from afar, with the X-Men’s own telepaths Emma Frost and Hope Summers struggling to keep him out of their minds. With multiple Sinisters acting to bolster the telepathic powers of one, eventually he even overcame most of the X-Men’s psi-defenses. And when Sinister was “killed” (as a mentally free Hope managed to do), a new member of the Sinister hive-mind would assert as the dominant version of Essex, perpetuating him so long as one body remained.
The X-Men were freed from his control when the first iteration of Sinister died, and Hope fought telepathically to keep him out of their heads again after that. Sinister enjoyed the opportunity to chat with Hope about nature vs. nurture, guiding her towards the word “Phoenix” for his own amusement. The fighting seemed incessant until Emma Frost recognized the weakness Sinister had made by basing his strategic mind too closely on Scott’s. Her own intimate familiarity with the shape of Scott’s thoughts allowed her to shut down Sinister in ways Hope could not. She compelled him to return the Dreaming Celestial’s head and deconstruct his Sinister species. Still, Essex retained his own failsafe, causing a new iteration to emerge from the creation engines with 
a tweaked cerebral architecture that prevented Emma from shutting him down again. Satisfied with the day’s events, Sinister teleported the Palace of Fine Arts to safety with the charged creation engines inside. With one final taunt at Cyclops about the direction he was going, Sinister killed himself, knowing the next iteration would emerge from his displaced engines moments later. [Uncanny X-Men (2nd series) #1-4]
Sinister’s affection for the Victorian era led him to create an entire city of Sinister London hidden underground in Alaska. His creation engines used the accumulated Celestial energy to spawn a full population for his city. A self-correcting evolutionary system, the Sinister species automatically 
adapted for all roles needed to continue Sinister’s work. He even produced rebels, Sinister clones who acted in defiance of Essex’s work in order to test it for flaws. But while the Celestial energy was fantastic, Sinister’s supply of it was also finite. Sinister had predicted that Hope Summers’ encounter with the Phoenix Force would lead to imperfect hosts in the Phoenix Five. He intended to harness the Phoenix Force for his own batteries and forged six clones of Madelyne Pryor as alternative hosts to better contain the Phoenix than the accidental Five. Content to wait until Scott’s attention turned back towards him, Sinister prepared his Marauders, his clone armies and other surprises for when the Phoenix Five inevitably advanced on ol’ Sinister London town. [Uncanny X-Men (2nd series) #14]
Mister Sinister was correct, and soon the Phoenix Five turned their telepathic powers towards locating Sinister London. The Five descended into the underground tunnels as Sinister prepared 
for war. He unleashed Marauder chimeras, mass-produced weaponized clones of Cyclops, Gambit, Cannonball and others, and even a mobile castle built on the back of a Krakoa. All this was solely designed to throw the Five off-balance until the Madelynes entered the fray. Grown and primed specifically for this purpose, the Madelynes stole the Phoenix Force from the X-Men. Sinister had become Prometheus, harnessing the fire of the gods for use by man.
The other members of the X-Men Extinction Team followed up after the Phoenix Five, trying to disrupt Sinister’s plans. Essex considered them entirely predictable, though, and entertained himself with using the Madelynes to refill his creation engines with Phoenix power. While Sinister basked in his own ego, Emma Frost reached out to the Phoenix Force telepathically and asked if 
it was truly happy being contained by Sinister. The Phoenix was evolution and change personified, and Sinister wanted to keep it in stasis. Properly motivated, the Phoenix began to burn out the Madelynes one by one. Sinister’s science and intellect were engineered to predict and adapt for all possible outcomes, but the Phoenix was literally unprecedented – a cosmic force of evolution creating new possibilities all the time. It would not be caged. And Sinister, for trying to cage it, simply would not be. The Phoenix Five, fully repowered, annihilated Sinister, his London, his creation engines and any trace of his city. [Uncanny X-Men (2nd series) #15-17]
Except… no. As arrogant as he was, Mister Sinister had conceived the possibility that harnessing a cosmic force might blow up in his face(s). For that eventuality, he used his shape-shifting ability to kill and replace Kate Kildare, the X-Men’s public relations specialist. As an added deception, a pre-programmed para-personality submerged his true identity beneath a copy of Kate’s until after 
the Phoenix situation resolved itself. And resolve it did, as Cyclops and his team were hopelessly disgraced and imprisoned, while Hope Summers finally claimed the Phoenix Force and undid the Decimation before returning the Phoenix to space. Sinister (as Kate) came to gloat in front of Scott in prison, goading him into breaking out and continuing their rivalry. [Uncanny X-Men (2nd series) #20]