BIOGRAPHY - Page 2
A couple of days later, Peter and Kitty were called back to London by his mate, Jardine, whose daughter had turned up missing. Amanda Jardine had a history of getting involved in bizarre and serious trouble, so her father was looking for special assistance in tracking her down. As a photojournalist, Amanda was investigating a recent run of serial murders, apparently going undercover as potential bait for the killer. Pryde and Wisdom consulted with the police department assigned to the case, a bizarre outfit nicknamed the Mystery School. They learned each of the victims was somehow tied to organized religion, and were being fossilized by an unknown power before an ancient language of symbols was carved into their stone corpses.
In order to make headway in the investigation, Pete was forced to make contact with his estranged family - visiting his borderline-senile father, Harold, to get a professional profiling on the killer and his sister, Romany, who could translate the symbols on the bodies. With Romany's help, they determined that the murderer delusionally believed himself to be Cain, son of Adam, and was composing a letter directly to God on the corpses he was leaving behind, asking for forgiveness and to be allowed admittance into heaven. Ascertaining the killer's identity as John Gideon, a deranged officer of the Mystery School, they tracked him down just as he had made contact with the plucky Amanda Jardine... and just after Harold Wisdom had taken it upon himself to hunt down Gideon. The killer petrified Harold's arm before fleeing the scene, but ultimately died in a subway crash as Shadowcat was trying to capture him. With the killer dead, Amanda safe and Pete more-or-less back on speaking terms with his family, Pryde and Wisdom returned to Excalibur. [Pryde & Wisdom #1-3]
Meanwhile, Captain Britain had recently taken Pete aside to discuss his "flash-forwards," glimpses of the future gleaned from his travels through the timestream. Brian convinced Wisdom that his last flash-forward (a horrible future where Kitty left Peter and Excalibur was wiped out) only happened because Wisdom never put aside his baggage and admitted that he loved Shadowcat. Despite the fact that Brian was feeding him a load of horse puckey, Wisdom didn't know that and so felt compelled to confess his feelings, for the good of the future of course. He and Kitty both said "I love you" to each other soon afterwards, and their relationship became even closer. [Excalibur (1st series) #103]
Unfortunately, it was not long thereafter that Wisdom began receiving e-mails about his old girlfriend, the contract killer, Sari St. Hubbins. Pete sent out feelers in the intelligence community about her current status and received an answer from his friend, Jardine, while staying in Hong Kong for a week... just before Jardine's head was blown off. As Excalibur left Hong Kong on separate jets for a series of personal escapades, Wisdom followed the trail Jardine left him to Hamburg, Germany. Unfortunately, Pete was captured by St. Hubbins, who had apparently hired herself out to a remnant cell of Black Air in order to get her revenge on Wisdom for turning her in all those years ago. He managed to escape from Sari's grasp, but that still left the matter of Nightcrawler, his traveling companion, who had apparently been sold off to an unknown enemy, just after they had been snagged by St. Hubbins. [Excalibur (1st series) #111-114]
Wisdom had a difficult enough time with the "team" concept without throwing in the guilt of possibly getting his friend and leader killed and, as Excalibur maintained a search for Kurt, Pete became even less tolerable than usual, prompting Kitty to take a break from him and the team to go off with S.H.I.E.L.D. for a few weeks. While she was gone, Excalibur's personal Cerebro unit finally locked in on Kurt's mutagenic signature in Venice, Italy. It turned out that Black Air had sold Nightcrawler off to some old alien enemies of his in the Sidri, but Wisdom and the rest of Excalibur managed to rescue him safely. [Kitty Pryde, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. #1, Excalibur (1st series) #115-117]
Though Pete's attitude improved as his conscience was eased, it was unfortunately a bit of too little, too late. While away on her S.H.I.E.L.D. mission, Shadowcat had flirted with a fellow intern closer to her own age. She did not develop any deep feelings for the boy, but the experience left her feeling that her relationship with Pete Wisdom was perhaps "aging" her prematurely. Wisdom was truly hurt by this when she confessed her concerns to him, and his pride kept him from staying to see if their relationship was at all salvageable. He packed up and left Muir Island immediately afterwards. [Excalibur (1st series) #119-120] He even stayed clear of Captain Britain and Meggan's wedding a few months later, rather than have to confront Kitty again.
During this period, Pete hooked up with a network of former Black Air and related intelligence operatives looking to make up for sins past by taking the fight to the shadow-world of black ops -- striking out at the people and organizations that malevolently control power in this world from behind a veil of secrecy. When next he surfaced, Wisdom was sporting an eye-patch (which later proved to be fake) and requisitioning the help of another mutant team, X-Force. Using a secret from Cannonball's past he had come across as incentive, Pete compelled the young mutants into helping him on a mission in Genosha to recover the Faraway, an experimental vessel whose computers held the secret to sub-space travel across the galaxies. Keeping this out of the hands of Magneto, Genosha's recently enthroned ruler, was in everyone's best interests. They were successful in the venture, and Wisdom and Cannonball developed a mutual respect for each other's abilities. [X-Force (1st series) #94-95]
They stayed in contact and, after X-Force was shaken by the High Evolutionary's weeks-long anti-mutation effect, Wisdom stepped forward and offered the group a purpose -- to help him administer justice to those organizations who didn't officially exist. Most of the team went with him, and so Pete and Sam Guthrie spent the following weeks retraining the team, establishing new battlefield tactics and learning to use their powers in new and different ways. For example, Wisdom taught Meltdown to use her plasma-based abilities in a similar way to his hot-knives, and he even made Warpath tap into his full potential when he manifested the power of self-propelled flight. [X-Force (1st series) #106-108]
Smirkingly calling himself "Professor W," Wisdom gave X-Force their marching orders and, for a time, they were quite successful. After returning to the team's old base of operations in San Francisco, however, they were confronted by an outbreak of deranged mutations, thanks to a bioreactor stored under the city's streets. While X-Force was successful in routing the chaos, Peter was apparently killed by the creator of the bioreactor, Doctor Niles Roman. [X-Force (1st series) #102-105]
His team buried Wisdom, but all was not as it seemed, as he turned up alive and well months later. It is unknown how Pete Wisdom survived, and why he didn’t reveal himself to his teammates. He followed X-Force’s adventures, though, at least their final mission, during which they destroyed a huge underground lab complex, in which Wisdom’s sister Romany was conducting illegal experiments with alien technology. One of the few people that Wisdom initially filled in on his survival was Alistair Stuart, now head of "the Department,” the follow-up agency to Black Air. [X-Force (1st series) #115]
Pete remained part of the world of British Intelligence, but the names and faces soon changed around him. Alistair Stuart mysteriously chose to resign from the Department in favor of work with MI-6, and he tried to disband the Department behind him as he left. Pete was furious at Alistair's apparent betrayal and fought back when MI-6 tried to encompass the Department's mandate for investigating "weird happenings" into their own function. He appealed to Sir Mortimer Grimsdale, chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee at Whitehall, and ended up being named the sole senior officer of MI-13, the Department's new successor. This inter-agency conflict led to a serious rift between Pete and Alistair Stuart, as well as Stuart's new associates at MI-6, Black Jack Tarr and Clive Reston. [Wisdom #1, 5]