A night on the town

You shiver in the dark strip club. You rushed out the door in shorts, sandals, and a polo, expecting Krakoa's tropical climate. Instead, Sage's lead sends you through a gate and into cold rainy Dublin instead. When you finally found the club you were looking for you were drenched. The bouncer almost didn't want to let you in but yielded once you flashed some cash courtesy of Wolverine's mission stipend.

Right now you're drying yourself by the heater, waiting for the main event. You hope you got the right place. How many strip clubs could there be in Dublin? Probably a lot. It's a big city. The current europop song you don't understand fads into another you don't understand. The current dancer is leaving and a new one is coming out. At this point, you're not impressed. These strippers aren't that good and after spending the day looking at superheroines on the beach they're not that impressive physically. Your internal monologue is interrupted as they announce the next dancer.

Emma's twenties were full of choices that she'd come to regret. Trusting Sebastian Shaw, abandoning her brother when she ran away, developing a rather nasty snow problem. At least she could say she resolved most of them in the decades since. She saved her brother from reliving the trauma their father put him through, Sebastian was firmly under her heel, and she was eight whole years sober. One mistake though still had its grip on her even today.

Emma looked at herself in the poorly-lit strip club mirror. Thanks to her telepathy everyone else here saw her as the 26-year-old ginger Dublin native Mary. She saw the truth though. Emma always avoided looking her thralls in the eye. Once you got past novice mental tricks you could influence most people without looking the part of the domineering hypnotist. It drew less attention. Still, she never forgot how they would stare back. The eyes would always glaze in response. For the simplest of commands, it would last a split second, but it would still be there. It's hard to notice if you don't know what you’re looking for. This glaze is what Emma saw as she looked in the mirror.

Emma's pupils were dilated like she was on the world’s strongest strain. Her face's resting position had her mouth hang wide open. It took focus just to purse her lips enough to apply lipstick. If this was the work of one of Emma's students she would fail them on the spot for handing in something so sloppy. It wasn't though. It was her.

When young Emma got off the train she snuck on from Boston to New York, she needed money. She conned her way into a hotel room and some clean clothes but she didn't want to just live off stealing with her mutant gift. It would defeat the purpose of her running away to make something of herself and, more importantly, it would attract way too much attention. Instead, she did what many young women her age did with no telepathy, no resume, and no money in the big city. Young Emma found the nearest strip club and got herself a job. On her first day the mousey young woman was terrified of the crowds and the other dancers and her boss and everything so she grabbed some moves from the most experienced vixen's head and stared into a mirror to give herself a telepathic boost of confidence and responsibility.

Decades later, Emma was still staring in a strip club mirror, and that "telepathic boost" of confidence and responsibility was still staring back. She focused on the sloppiness of the technique because it was easier than digesting the reality of the situation. Every time Emma tried to unravel this terrible psychic compulsion she failed. She could swap bodies with the weather goddess Ororo, reconstruct her mind after the Phoenix **** damn near melted it, and re-implant the souls of dead mutants into new bodies, but she couldn't undo the work of a spoiled, inexperienced 19-year-old upstart. She would be "Hazel" every day of her life. Or “Stacy” or “Tiffany” or “Brooke.” It didn’t matter the name, she would be in these backrooms until her hair was gray and her skin sagged so much she would have to open her own club just to dance in it. She could claw, scheme, and steal as big a fortune as she wanted, nothing would change. Before she was the White Queen, before she was a founding member of The Quiet Council of Krakoa, before she was the leader of the Hellfire Trading Company, she was that homeless gutter rat of a girl, drunk with power, scared out of her mind, and so **** she was going to shake her ass in front of strangers every day to get by.

Emma finished overapplying almost an entire pallet of smokey eyeshadow and dropped the glamor back down. She no longer needed to know where to apply which meant she no longer needed to know what her real face looked like under that psychic suggestion. She replaced every image in her mind of being here tonight with the look of her alter ego. She wasn't Emma Frost right now. In fact, she wasn't even Hazel. She was Cherry.

She looked herself up and down one more time before leaving. She wasn't going to bring her good lingerie to a backwater place like this. Instead, she wore a cheap zip-up maroon corset that made her skin itch. It had white ruffles hot-glued to the top and bottom. It was loose so she would have an easy time removing it on stage, but that meant it provided no support and her breasts swam in the empty space. She wore a tight pink lace thong underneath framed by red lace garters and stockings. They didn't match but they also didn't clash so who cared? No one was seriously looking at them. Cherry's heels gave her a full extra foot and that wasn't an exaggeration. Stripping meant everyone in the building would be looking at Cherry's body very intensely so she couldn't change much in her telepathic glamor. Wearing obscenely high heels—even for a stripper—meant Cherry could be taller than the White Queen and the glamor wouldn't need to reposition her; it would just look like she was wearing slightly shorter heels. The trade-off was that even after two decades of living the nightlife in these heels she still sprained her ankle getting home once a month. She didn't bring a change of clothes. She changed back at home. Spending any more time here risked someone naturally resistant to telepathy seeing through her disguise.

She looked closely at the glamor, trying to fake out its automatic filter. Cherry had natural hair down to her shoulders with extensions clipped in that ended right below the cups of her corset. You could tell the cut-off incredibly easily by how much thinner the extensions were. In reality, all this red hair was a wig over a bald cap covering up her blonde locks. The hardest part though was the freckles. The human brain is really bad at making things random, and telepaths were no exception. Instead, she spent four late nights after getting home hunched over her laptop watching redhead fetish porn. She combed over every pore of those actresses and cataloged how their freckles spotted their bodies. Then she used some background brainpower of some of the patrons at the club while they were preoccupied ogling to make a telepathic neural network, mapping out the freckles to her fictional body. It was a lot of work, and somewhat degrading, but she tried to have pride in her glamor. It was the only thing that let her feel good about her hell of a second life.

Cherry was so lost in her checking and double-checking her disguise she didn’t hear the clacking of heels approach her.

“Hazel, you're up after Quinn,” A voice behind Emma said. She turned and saw Riley, her “senior.” She was a tall but slim woman with dark skin the color of mahogany. Her hair was bleached with brown roots showing and her eyes were grey. She had breasts that were large for her frame. Her surgeon wasn't as good as Cherry's, but he wasn't bad. "And please, keep the theatrics to a minimum."

"Hmpf, I'll try," Cherry scoffed playfully. She wished she could be honest about this. Oh Lord, her knees wish she could be honest, but the compulsion demanded her all, and she could give it.

Cherry pushed her hair out her face and took some deep breaths. She shook off her nerves. She didn't need to go over routine, it wasn't engraved into her mind. Every routine she had done was. No matter how banal or amateur. She closed her eyes and tried to dissociate as the meaningless club song died down. She took these last few seconds she had to herself to relax. Then, as Quinn walked off, Cherry opened her eyes and walked on.