EMMA FROST

At the Massachusetts Academy, the White Queen was grooming fourteen-year-old Angelica Jones — the young mutant who would become Firestar — into an assassin for the Hellfire Club. The grooming was systematic: Emma fitted Angelica with a bracelet that was secretly a hallucinator, rigged her training sessions with exploding robots, and fed her nightmares about the X-Men so that Emma herself would be the only adult the frightened girl trusted.

Angelica's one uncomplicated happiness at the school was a stable horse named Butter Rum. In Firestar #2 (1986), the stables were set alight on the night of a school dance; Angelica rushed in, dragged Butter Rum out of the flames — and the horse collapsed and died in her arms. The fire had been arranged, and the death was Emma's own work: she telepathically stopped the horse's heart, leaving Angelica certain that her own microwave powers had cooked the animal she loved.

The manufactured guilt did exactly what it was designed to do, binding Angelica tighter to the one person offering comfort. It could not hold forever: Angelica eventually learned how she had been used, nearly killed Frost in her fury, and fled the Academy for good. Decades later, in Immortal X-Men #4 (2022), Emma finally said the quiet part aloud, confessing that she had made a girl believe she had cooked her own horse so the girl would come to her for sympathy.