New Mutants #13: Never Mind You, I Hope We Survive The Experience

New Mutants skips ahead again for #13. Amara, now in Westchester, signs up with the New Mutants and joins the school. She hadn't met Xavier before, having agreed to enroll at his school sight unseen, and starts to get second thoughts when she realises quite how mindready he is. He's made an exact copy of her room in Nova Roma while assuring her that of course "Your mind is your own. I will not pry". What would this man consider prying, exactly? Her welcome barbecue goes hilariously wrong, with beer flying everywhere, her dress ruined, and a great big crack opening in the ground. They leave her alone for a while.

The non-New Mutants parts of this (which follow up events in Uncanny and will have consequences there - we'll see in the next year or so it how the two titles sort of becomes a bimonthly title under two names) are fairly talky but intriguing. Kitty has a new friend, a local boy called Douglas Ramsey. We've heard of him before - he's the software expert to Kitty's hardware geek. Kitty is recklessly using his contacts to hack into Hellfire Club computer systems, bringing down random remote systems, and getting leads about possible collusion with the government.

That would be Project: Wideawake, then, to which Val Cooper (just introduced in #176) is being brought on to. They're testing a new type of Sentinel, but it goes wrong and has to be destroyed. Five million dollars worth of equipment gone. (Seriously, only five million dollars? That's less than an F-16!)

All this hacking (WarGames was released last year, 2600 would be launched in 1984, so Claremont is riding a zeitgeist here) is making Kitty run late for her meeting with the Professor. Both him and the New Mutants call her on her ridiculous petty feud with them (something we've not really seen any evidence for, after she rejoined the main team). She takes the point, and agrees to patch up things and help Amara. The little Kitten is growing up.

The next day, it's Amara's first session in the Danger Room. She's got a new codename: "Magma", and a uniform. She's unhappy about the Professor casually mentioning that he is going to be telepathically monitoring her, and runs off, but this time without causing any minivolcanoes or earthquakes, which is progress of a kind.

The conflict between her and Xavier is somewhat vacuously resolved by her eavesdropping a conversation between Lilandra and Xavier. She decides to stay - she doesn't want to have any more incidents like almost destroying Rio. So we've taken an entire issue to put her more or less in the same position that she was at the end of #12.