CABLE

Buried in the service record of the most heavily armed man in any century sits a line nobody expects: Cable is a Harvard-educated lawyer. When Nathan Summers first travelled back from his ruined future to the present day, he arrived as a stranger with no past the modern world could file. He met Charles Xavier in secret, discussed the future he had come to prevent, and — with that help — established a legal identity under the name Nathan Winters.

Then the time-tossed revolutionary did something almost defiantly normal: he enrolled. Nathan attended Harvard Law School and graduated with a law degree, collecting a Juris Doctor from one of the most demanding institutions on Earth in a century that was not his own, in a language and legal tradition he had only just been taught. Only after the diploma did he take the name Cable and start paying for his private war the mercenary way.

The degree was never decoration. Askani schooling had already given him sciences far beyond the modern era, and Harvard added the other weapon: how the present day’s power actually moves — contracts, courts, corporations and the paper trails mercenaries leave behind. The man who would later negotiate treaties and run a country first learned statecraft the slow way, in a lecture hall, as a mature student roughly two thousand years older than his classmates’ civilisation.