The Plot?

[Clyde Schneider]

Highcrest is an immensely popular city for many reasons: it’s nightlife, it usual big-city promise of fame and wealth . . . it’s rather unusual denizens. Though no one talks about it and it certainly isn’t in the travel brochures, many of the people who come to visit Highcrest are either looking for people like them, or want to see if the rumors about “gifted” people are true. Some come with more benign intents (cures and counseling) and some with darker.

Schneider happily lists himself under the second category, though he is careful not to let anyone know it. An unusual man, few know much about him – save that he doesn’t like mutants very much. It seems odd to some, then, that he would live in the largest community of gifted people in the world, but not many people want to talk to him long enough to find out why. And when he started hiring gifted people, most assumed he was having a change of heart and forgot the matter.

Until people began to go missing.

It was nothing unusual at first (particularly in such a big city) – just a person here or there that was there one moment and no the next. Before long, however, it had grown so that there were whispers and stories on every corner – stories that ranged from aliens and government conspiracies to networks of people lurking in the shadows. Many scoff (even as they continue to tell the stories), but some buy into it wholeheartedly and spend their time watching over their shoulders. And all the time Schneider has been leading a publicly quiet life while the disappearing mutants pass through his basement in the process of being sold to wealthy owners around the world.

Schneider has been responsible for the kidnapping – and subsequent selling – of gifted people around the world, though it was only recently that has set out to investigate Highcrest. It was just a rumor first, and not even about the city – a gifted associate of his had discovered the nearby Silas Academy, and after receiving more reports of a similar sort, he picked up stakes and moved. A school of mutants – he’d have his choice of whatever power he wanted! He gathered up his mutants – commonly called “Wheelers” by those in the know – who, though gifted themselves, are unwaveringly loyal in the betrayal of their own at Schneider’s command(or at least they appear to be), and set out for Highcrest and the school. Now that he’s established there, he’s almost giddy with the prospect of a whole city of mutants from which to pick and choose.