In the mean time, Lord Xavier had found Clay's sister Taysha for him. Xavier quite liked Taysha and fell in love again after all those years of being a widower. He ended up marrying her, making her Lady X. Some time later, Lord X - at his wife's request - searches out and finds Jake and Wulf - hers and Clay's other two brothers. They are brought back to the Estate and indoctrinated into the 'clan' there. Like the others, they'd fought in the Corporate Wars and done their time. Having dealt often with mutants in those days, Jake was sent back to the States to collect information on the mutant populations, as they seem to be changing their tactics and strategies...showing signs of developing their own sort of hunting techniques. From what he'd witnessed with different groups of them, he was fairly certain he knew the answer now to the question he'd been sent to answer: Why would humans would go live with the mutants and mutants would tolerate humans amongst them? It was pretty much widely known that the original mutants had been a result of many things. Primarily, they were the result of certain large entities calling themselves 'people' who were not, making their own use of the original experiments done by a pair of rogue British scientists on their several foster children. The thing 'they' didn't tell you these days was that it didn't take years of laboratory testing on unwilling subjects any more. If one of them bit you now...well it was something like that old werewolf tale. The lucky ones got annihilated. Those who didn't - sometimes they had family that they remembered. They would often kidnap that person or those persons. There were those who would even go with their former lover, roomate, spouse, sibling...whatever, just because they feared to live alone or were so blinded by attachment, they had no clue what it was they were getting into. If that still human one didn't have a broken mind when they got there, they were soon rendered mad by the things they witnessed in the mutant encampments. A starving mutant was hardly anything anyone in their right mind would mess with. A whole pack of them...hungry...that would get ugly. "In many ways," he was told, "the large number of them act in more or less the same societal structure as wolves. So you have to think of them that way. Where are they in the pack? Are they the Alpha male or female? Are they loners? Are they betas or even less. Less than that is expendable, if need be. But...here's the difference: the Alpha's will not go out. They'll send any and everyone else out beneath them that they have to, in order to collect the source of whatever it is they feed on or want. If you want to survive, you have to be good. Otherwise - pffffttt! See you next life! You'd best hope a desperate Alpha never comes after you." To make a long story short as to the sum of the reasoning: If you were human and still had enough sanity left to you for self preservation, you would devise a plan with whatever it is you know best....to keep yourself from getting fed on. If you manage to trap and trick a handful of humans for them each night, that would keep them sated for awhile and they wouldn't be looking at you as a potential buffet. So, the human became a daemon for the pack - doing their little odd jobs for them and keeping them fed and otherwise sated. Talk about a 'vicious circle'. Some kind of understatement. So, the buggers had human slaves now. ***** SRG_RSJake (YD)