All three fell silent.
This wasn't a truth that brought any joy—a group of children had encountered danger at a summer camp where their cries for help went unnoticed by heaven and unheard by earth. Even if there had been thirty children instead of three, they would still not pose a threat to the robust instructors.
The children's fear came all too easily. If the perpetrator were a habitual criminal who understood this, he would have a thousand ways to ensure the children wouldn't dare speak out about what happened here. The majority of child sexual abusers who aren't caught immediately often escape the law through such means.
It may sound ridiculous, but they might even concoct a naive lie such as, "If you talk about what happened today, a demon will come out from under your bed and eat you up." Stricken by the shock of the unusual and in a state of stress, the children would take it as truth and dare not say anything.
It wasn't because they were foolish; rather, a child's brain is not fully developed. Surveys indicate that 90% of children have had experiences where they couldn't distinguish between fantasy and reality, a necessary process in the maturation of the brain.
Once stimulated, the line between fantasy and reality becomes even more blurred. Some habitual criminals take advantage of this to twist children's common sense, making them believe that maybe what happened isn't a big deal or intimidating them with non-existent phantasms. Through repeated emphasis, they make the children believe it's the truth, thus threatening them into silence.
"Thank goodness David is here," Charles said. "If it were an ordinary person, no matter how fanciful they might be, they would hardly escape harm."
Batwoman turned to look at the venomous plant trapped within the bubble; up close, his appearance was even more ridiculous. He didn't even have legs; his lower half was made of coiled plants, and he had long, large arms with his jester's cap sitting askew.
He didn't have concrete eyes or a nose, but he did have a large mouth, which at the moment was opening and closing as if he wanted to say something.
"Let me go!!" he yelled.
"Do you know something?" Batman asked. "I think you can tell we're here to help David."
"No, I don't know anything."
Batwoman narrowed her eyes.
The venomous plant was clearly hiding something, but perhaps because he appeared in David's childhood, his behavior was somewhat childish; when lying, he unconsciously averted his eyes, which of course did not escape the two great detectives.
"You have to tell us," Batman said. "David is in great danger now. If we don't stop him, he will do something he'll regret."
Instead of speaking of grand principles like endangering the world, Batman chose to start from David's perspective. This seemed to have struck a chord with the venomous plant, who stammeringly and gaspingly said, "I am not the first."
Batwoman and Batman exchanged looks. Good, they had obtained an even more important piece of information—David had awakened his mutant ability before the age of seven.
"Nobody could understand him," the venomous plant said. "No one has ever understood him."
"Has someone misunderstood him?" Charles asked. "Or has he been ostracized? Discriminated against because he's a mutant?"
"We always say, if you have a stance, don't be a detective," Batman interjected. "None of the characters in the testimonials should be pre-judged, particularly from your own perspective. It's biased and only serves to prove your poor judgement and nothing else."
Charles's eyes widened, never having heard such a deprecating opinion from anyone before.
"Have you suffered discrimination?" Batwoman sharply pointed out. "If you have, then by pre-judging others' stances, you are doing exactly what those who discriminated against you did. Even if we take a step back, you're allowing yourself to become as foolish as them."
Charles was angry, but he couldn't find a retort right away. He felt too tired; if his condition were better, he would have the energy to explain to the two Batmen what mutants have really gone through.
"I think there could be two meanings here," Batman analyzed. "No one has ever truly known David. It's possible that his original personality rarely appeared from the start, and people mistook other personalities for him, denying him a sense of existence."
"Or David has always been present, but he's always been misunderstood because of his abilities. This leads him to feel unacknowledged, marginalized by society, and lonely."
"Does he want others to understand him?" Batwoman mumbled, "Could that be the answer?"
"Our clues are too scant. Usually, those who wish for attention and understanding would act in shocking ways. Perhaps we can deduce the origins of the other personalities in this way and figure out what kind of person David really is."
"What kind of person do you think David is, ma'am?" Shiller asked.
"He's a very silent child, somewhat detached. We suspect he might have Asperger syndrome, but because he was too old when he arrived here, and to avoid agitating him, we didn't perform a pathological examination," Moira answered.
"Overall, he's not naughty. Apart from when his superpower is out of control, he's very quiet. He shows some panic with excessive attention from people, suggesting a degree of social impairment."
"So it seems he's not an exhibitionist personality."
"No," Moira shook her head, "he doesn't have a special fondness for people's gazes, neither avoiding it in fear nor seeking it at all costs. In this respect, his behavior is relatively normal."
"What about the ability to establish long-term emotional relationships? What is your relationship with him like, PhD?" Shiller asked.
Moira sighed softly and said, "I'm sorry, I am a geneticist. I only obtained a degree in sociology and psychology during my postgraduate studies. I am not licensed, nor am I specialized."
"I provided him with some company, perhaps educated him too, but I never established any long-term relationship with him. I was more like the most familiar stranger among a group of strangers to him."
Shiller shook his head slightly and said, "Psychological intervention came too late. What about his parents? How do you think his relationship with his parents was?"
"I seldom heard David mention them," said Moira. "However, there was one time during my experiment when an alarm went off. When I arrived at the reception hall of the research center, I learned that a family member of one of the children we were looking after had caused a scene."
"The reaction of the other party was very intense. He believed his child had fully recovered and should leave. Then, his child displayed mutant abilities right in front of him, so he furiously accused us of not keeping our promise to make his child normal."
"Security told me that David was also present at the time. At first, he acted quite normally, but after the lady started going crazy, he began to act somewhat strangely."
"Strange in what way?"
"We can't access surveillance footage at will, but when I went to find David later, he seemed a bit scared and kept mumbling something... I don't know, it didn't seem at all like things he should be saying."
"What was he saying?"
"World War II, the Carnage, some events that happened in Germany," Moira pursed her lips and said. "I guess it might have been something his mother told him."
"What about his mother?"
"David's mother was a German Jew; David's maternal grandfather died in the Carnage of World War II. He was young then but witnessed the entire event. I suspect it may have left some psychological scars in her."
"And then she told all this to David?"
"Perhaps it wasn't something she revealed on purpose. I don't think any loving mother would describe such things to her child, but having suffered such severe trauma, there might be some things beyond her control."
Shiller swayed his pen, deep in thought.
Indeed, the background story of the Legion did mention the meeting between Professor X and Legion's mother; it was Professor X who helped drive away her past shadows so the two of them fell in love.
Shiller speculated that this might have been a mistake made by Professor X in his youth. The mistake was not falling in love with Legion's mother but rather helping her wipe away the shadows.
From this young Charles, one could see that Professor X's method of dealing with such issues in his youth was rather crude: erase memories, create new ones, patch up one wall by breaking another, wherever there was a leak, patch it up.
Such a method might support the situation for a while, but as the saying goes, human memory isn't a game of building blocks. Anyone who treats well-constructed thinking as a game will pay a heavy price, which Shiller knew from experience.
If Charles could have continued to patch things up alongside David's mother over the years, perhaps he might indeed have dispelled the old shadows after decades; but the problem is that the two of them only dated for a few months before parting ways, which is bound to cause issues.
What's worse, if Charles hadn't intervened at the time, the lady might have chosen to seek medical help later on when her problems worsened. But because Charles erased her memory, she felt pain but couldn't find the cause, and naturally, she couldn't seek medical help, nor could the doctors solve the problem, which could have led to increasingly severe issues.
This might be one of the root causes of David's problems. Shiller speculated that more frightening than a nasty temperament or a volatile temper was an emotionally unstable parent, which could prematurely, excessively trigger a child's self-defense mechanisms. And once these mechanisms are excessively triggered, they could lead to mental or personality splits as a form of self-protection.
Over the Psychic_Battlefield of Paris, Gwen Spider Man was desperately fleeing.
She stretched her hand and shot out a strand of Spider Silk, which glistened in the sunlight, the ripples opening the air as it steadily stuck to the glass curtain wall of a building.
But the next second, the white blob that had firmly adhered to the glass curtain wall began to shrink, turning into a point, and the fiber began to retract as if being devoured by something, the Spider Silk returning to its origin.
The expression on Gwen Spider Man's face gradually changed from shock to her previous panic-stricken state.
When she reappeared, she found herself still standing on the ground, and the quiet, dark-haired man appeared before her again.
"What the hell?!" Gwen Spider Man raised her voice, looking at the person opposite her in somewhat panic and said, "What in the world is this? How could he possibly…"
"He can control time," a deep voice came from behind Gwen Spider Man.
Gwen Spider Man turned her head and saw a red figure with pointed ears.