PSYLOCKE

When Chris Claremont returned to the X-books in 2000, the line jumped forward six months — and Betsy Braddock came back wrong in the most interesting way. The telepath who had built her name on the psychic knife suddenly had no telepathy at all. Instead she lifted, hurled and shaped pure force with her mind: telekinesis, a gift that had never been hers. The new arrangement debuted in X-Men vol. 2 #100 and Uncanny X-Men #381 (both 2000).

The other half of the trade stood across the room. Jean Grey had lost her telekinesis during the same unseen interval and gained Betsy’s telepathic reach on top of her own, crossing the astral plane in a shadowed form she had never worn before. Betsy, meanwhile, rebuilt her signature weapon out of borrowed power, extruding a blade of raw telekinetic force and swinging it like it had always belonged to her.

Here is the truly obscure part: nobody ever showed the swap happen. Claremont’s short return ended before the six-month gap could be filled in, later writers simply let both women drift back toward their full power sets, and the exchange remains one of the great unexplained edits in X-Men history — a trade two flagship psychics made off-panel, apparently for keeps, without leaving a receipt.