QUICKSILVER

After the Onslaught crisis, Pietro took his daughter Luna to shelter in the High Evolutionary's citadel on Mount Wundagore, the mountain where the twins had been born. When Exodus and his Acolytes besieged the citadel in Quicksilver Vol. 1 #1 (1997), Pietro fought beside the Knights of Wundagore — the uplifted animal New Men who serve the Evolutionary as an order of armoured knights — and when their creator departed, he did something nobody expected: he appointed Pietro their new leader.

The promotion was a life sentence disguised as an honour. The Knights were soldiers engineered for obedience and ceremony, and their new commander was a man constitutionally incapable of waiting for a kettle to boil. Pietro relocated the entire order to a castle on the Hudson River in Quicksilver Vol. 1 #2 (1997) and spent the thirteen-issue series doing the one thing his speed had never trained him for — staying in one place and being responsible for other people.

The posting also sat him on top of his family's strangest fault line. The Evolutionary was the man who had engineered the twins' earliest days on that same mountain, midwife Bova was among his creations, and Pietro's knights included animals granted speech and heraldry by the same experiments that had once fenced the Maximoffs in. Leadership, for once, meant Pietro could not simply run out of the room when the past caught up with him — the past was his garrison.