BISHOP

Most fugitives from Bishop's timeline arrived in the present the obvious way, through Trevor Fitzroy's portals. Mountjoy, a body-stealing mutant called a merger, chose a sneakier route: he hid inside the body of Fitzroy's servant Bantam for the whole trip. When Bantam finally confessed and begged for protection, the hunt that fills Bishop Vol. 1 #1–4 (1994–1995) began — and its quarry could wear anybody, including the hunter.

Mountjoy proved it in stages. He seized Storm during a night out in New York and had to be forced out of her. Days later, after Forge repaired a future holo-projector carrying the recorded mind of Bishop's late sister Shard, Bishop quit the X-Men outright so he could kill Mountjoy without breaking the team's rules — and walked straight into a police-station ambush that left him unconscious in the villain's hands.

Bishop woke wearing his own face like a rented suit: Mountjoy was inside him, steering his body back into the mansion. The merger soon traded up, absorbing Gambit, Psylocke and Archangel at once. Bishop's counterattack used the Danger Room's Shi'ar technology to make Shard's hologram solid enough to grapple Mountjoy — and when the villain grabbed the solid Shard as a hostage, she ordered her brother to fire anyway. Bishop blasted them both, freeing the X-Men and knocking Mountjoy out, but the shot wrecked Shard's holomatrix and cost him his sister a second time. Offered a captive enemy and a clear conscience problem, Bishop spared Mountjoy's life — the choice Professor Xavier later cited as proof the future lawman truly belonged among the X-Men.