RAFAEL WILCOX: Rafe Wilcox (not his real name) was a hyperactive kid with a genius IQ and lousy grades due to boredom. He was a teenage chess champion when his mother's ob/gyn, Dr. Milbury, persuaded him to come to a "research center". Here, Rafe learned that he was a mutant, that his power was to speed up his mind, and that he was a disappointment to "Milbury"-- really a creature called Sinister-- because he had been created via a breeding project that *should* have produced an exceptionally powerful child.

After four years of hell, being experimented on, Rafael managed successfully to escape Sinister. In the course of this time, the formerly arrogant and impatient boy learned humility and discipline and the value of keeping a low profile. He also learned total control over his powers and the ability to self-hypnotize. When he got out, he took the identity of Rafael Wilcox and built himself a career as a technologist, the guy you turn to to build gadgets. Not nearly so famous in the circles in the know as Tony Stark or MU-Forge, but respectable nonetheless.

Carolyn found him in the days when she was trying to use Minda as a mutant detector-- a difficult and straining process for both herself and Minda. Rafe was horrified to find out that telepaths could detect him. He offered to work with her to build a telepathic mutant detector if she'd teach him enough about telepathy that he could do so. She agreed willingly; perhaps she didn't know that his real motive in helping was to learn enough about telepathy that he could biuld jammers, and perhaps she did and didn't care.

In XXY, Rafe and Carolyn both worked on Cerebro-- Carolyn is *not* a gadgeteer (I never really thought Charles was much of one anyway)-- and it's Rafe who designed the early Danger Room, to Carolyn's specs. Rafael is a freelancer, and the watchword of his life is "caution" and "low profile." He works for Carolyn because she pays, but he'd never join X-Factor, and he's reasonably comfy with selling different technologies to other people. He stays out of active munitions, but he'll build security systems; if Mystique comes to him and wants a gadget, such as a psi-jammer, he'll provide it.

POWERS: Rafael can speed up his mind, up to 5 times human, through an act of conscious will. This has no impact on his body, which moves at normal speed, but allows him to coldly assess all the possibilities before taking action. He has a good memory and high intelligence, but no better than a normal human genius; it's only the fact that he thinks so much faster than everyone else that gives him an edge. He is an engineer who enjoys technical design, particularly of security systems, as his abilities and the paranoia he learned while he was Sinny's experiment make him well-suited to think out all the ways to break a system, then design a system impervious to all of them.

WHY HE'S HERE: I was writing the John Grey Joins X-Factor story and I thought-- where the hell does Carolyn get the Danger Room robots? Where did Charles? Then Tammy wrote up Vashti, and I thought how silly it was that all our mutant techie people are female except for Kit Pryde; I mean, surely the prevalance of male mutant techies in MU has something to do with social prejudice channelling people toward discovering their powers? So shouldn't there be some in XXY? So, given that Carolyn, unlike Charles, is not even remotely like an inventor, I added an inventor character. He's not a deus ex-- he's not a supergenius like Stark or Richards or a mutant with an inventing power like Forge. He's just pretty good at what he does. Creator: Alara Rogers