MYSTIQUE

Mystique’s shapeshifting used to stop at faces and bodies she had seen. That ceiling broke in X-Men Forever Vol. 1 #6 (2000), aboard the sentient ship Prosh, where the cosmic Stranger’s machinery was rebuilding Toad’s unstable genetics. When the molecular restabilization conduit snapped at 84 percent, only Mystique was close enough to reconnect it by hand — knowing the energies could warp even her malleable body.

Thinking of Destiny, she grabbed the cables and took the discharge. Toad emerged whole, with new strength and a prehensile tongue. Mystique emerged changed too: ridges ran over her body at first, and her morphing had permanently widened — she could now generate working anatomy on demand, sprouting wings to fly, talons for weapons, night-vision eyes, gills and even a mermaid’s tail, and shift her mass and density far beyond her old limits.

The upgrade quietly explains the wilder transformations of her later career. The woman who once needed a costume could, after one act of self-sacrifice for Toad of all people, simply build whatever body the job required.