Meld wondered how long someone like Hunter could remain a simple adviser, little more than human. Here was someone who had lived for centuries and, from all that she had both been told and intuited, been accustomed to great power. How long would be be able to remain as he was, modestly trying to help others with few ambitions of his own? Even were he not helping her, it would be fascinating to find out what became of him.

"If anyone would make an apt adviser, I think it would be you," Meld stated. It was, after all, nothing more than truth. "The trick is in how to get such a plan started. I'm hardly the right type of individual to be negotiation with anyone, mutant or human." A quirk of the lip in amusement. Right. Her. Negotiate and bargain. Now that was an amusing thought.

Hunter nodded at the compliment. “A simple start would be to talk to fellow mutants about how they would feel about a mutant nation where they could live free governed by their own kind,” he suggested, “If enough people get behind an idea things generally start to happen on their own.”

He wondered what might come of sparking off this idea in Meld’s head. Hunter had no intention of doing any more than advise. It would be up to Meld to try and get this up off the ground if she wanted to.

"How would one start such a movement though?" Meld asked, honestly unsure. She had originally decided to join the Order because of the need for some real direction and because she had felt, at the time, that it would be beneficial to have an organization backing and supporting her and the furthering of the cause. She wasn't a leader, wasn't the sort to start a moment, she was a soldier and a fighter. Starting something like that seemed daunting, to say the least.

"Have you brought up this idea to anyone else? Did anyone else seem interested?" It was strange how one simple idea could so completely turn Meld's mind in directions she had never before considered. How long it would last, she didn't know or even if it would make a difference in her mindset. Still, it was an interesting exercise in thought if nothing else.

“It’s not come up in other discussions,” He told Meld, “So I’ve only spoken to you about it. Before Tibet I had plans for forming a mutant nation,” including a puppet leader all picked out, “But I kept them to myself.”

Hunter was glad to see Meld’s mind working over the problem of her cause from an entirely new angle. Rather than planning on killing those who were a threat to her cause she was starting to think about a long term solution quite possibly for the first time.

"Why did you never got through with those plans?" Meld asked. "Just because you did some bad things in life doesn't mean that every plan you might have had at that time was bad. Trying to atone for a few sins is no reason to abandon an idea that has the potential to help millions."

Meld didn't quite grasp the connections between killing and the ambition for power. Her own ambitions had always been for mutant kind and the good of the mutant cause, never for personal power. If anything her greatest hope in life was that one day her cause would be a success and she would be able to retire quietly, hopefully with someone to love her by her side. Of course, as the soldier she was that wasn't going to happen and because of both her inability to touch and her screwed up emotional state, she wasn't likely to ever have anyone to love her either. It was a depressing feeling.

“I never went through with it because not all the pieces were in place,” Hunter explained, “I could have formed the mutant nation, but it would not have been under my control. A mutant only nation was going to be an important piece in my plan for global domination. I wasn’t making it to help anyone but myself. All the primary officials of the nation would merely be puppets and I’d be pulling their strings.”

Hunter had taken to world domination by taking advantage of his immortality and sticking to the old phrase of ‘More haste, less speed”. There was no need to rush things when by waiting for a decade or so more it would have a better result and cost him less time in the long run. Rome wasn’t built in a day after all.

Global domination? Meld blinked at Hunter. She knew he had had his issues in the past, but global domination? Really? He was being serious wasn't he? What kind of megalomaniac did one have to be to have ambitions of world domination? Did people, real people, even think that way? But, somehow, he actually looked serious about it. Be wasn't joking was he? It took a lot to surprise Meld but this was a genuine surprise.

"You wanted to take over the world?" Meld asked. It was a stupid obvious question but she just couldn't quite manage to wrap her head around someone actually thinking that way. Especially someone who seemed so grounded and down to earth.

“When you are as powerful as I am and are going to live forever you eventually become bored,” Hunter explained, “I needed something to do. Trying to take over the world was something that people had tried throughout the ages. Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Hitler, they had all tried. I knew that taking over the world was something that would keep me occupied for a century or two.”

That was the brutal and honest truth of the matter. Hunter wasn’t trying to take over the world for the power or with any grand ideas of making a better world. It just gave him something to do. He wasn’t sure what he’d do if he’d succeeded but then that was never the point.

For the first time Meld was really starting to feel like she was beginning to understand exactly what type of person, what type of creature, that Hunter had once been. It went so far beyond her own penchant for violence; perhaps her own problems were physically incapable or reaching the same dimensions even if she allowed them to remain unchecked. After all, he had endless eternity and she had a mere flicker of human years.

"I don't think you need to worry about me as much as you think you do," Meld finally stated, with a sigh. "I might kill sometimes but you don't need to project your own fears of past mistakes onto me. I can't do what you've done. I certainly can't decide that I want to take over the world just because I'm bored."

“I might not need to worry about you trying for world domination,” he said, “But I do worry that you will reach a point where you kill simply for the sake of killing. It doesn’t take all time to become evil. There have been more than enough human monsters who have managed to equal some of my acts with much less time.”

That was what he worried about. Meld’s cause gave her desire for killing a focus and allowed her to direct it. If her urges became too strong he worried that she might not be able to focus them. Then she could become a monster of terrifying proportions.

"Do things inevitably progress like that? Becoming worse and worse with time? Aren't there some that reach a certain point and that's where it remains? Or those who only kill occasionally and never have to worry about going beyond that? Some mob hit men, for example, kill for money but rarely kill any any other time."

The example was sound the Meld knew that it probably didn't apply to her. For all that she wanted to believe that she would always be able to control her urges, she knew that killing went beyond mere money or even beyond the furthering of her cause for her. There was an intangible addictive property to it, something about it and the power it gave her that made her feel truly alive. It was the euphoria that it brought her that was the real danger because it was that euphoria that was the key to her growing addiction to it.

“You’re right,” Hunter told Meld, “There are people out there who can just kill professionally and not let it affect their private lives. They are people who have no emotional attachment to killing. If you thought that was you you wouldn’t have come to me in the first place.”

Professional hit men, assassins and mercenaries had no compulsion about killing because they had managed to emotionally detach themselves from it. For them killing was just a job and nothing more. Both he and Meld knew that she did not fall into that category. Killing registered on a very emotional level for her. That was the problem.

How was it even possible for one to kill without personal attachment or emotional effect? Meld was pretty sure that her early kills had been like that, but that had been such a long time ago she wasn't even certain she was remembering accurately. When had it changed from business to something so much darker than that? When had she begun to enjoy it, to crave it? The questions were deeply disturbing.

"How was it for you?" Meld asked. "Did you enjoy it? Beyond the need for blood?" Maybe if a disconnect could be formed she might not have to worry about the scars on her sould but she knew it wasn't going to happen. With her, it had to be all or nothing there was no comfortable middle ground.

“At first I killed out of necessity. Then out of fear and panic. Killing was the first real power I had, the first way in which I could exert my will on others. Originally I was appalled by the killing I had done. But soon I came to enjoy it,” he admitted, “I would find new methods of killing purely to heighten the experience for me.”

He’d even gone beyond just killing them himself. More than once he’d taken the time to manipulate circumstances around someone to drive them deep enough into despair that they would take their own life. The mere thought of that horrified him now.

Meld sighed, understanding far too well the mindset that Hunter must have been in. Even if she hadn't gone down that path as far as he had, she had gone down far enough to know what it was like. She wished she hadn't, wished she could erase some of thing things she had done and, worse, some of the things she had enjoyed doing but she knew that was impossible.

"I've gone far beyond simple killing," Meld said, true regret in her voice. She rarely even let herself feel such regret and, until recently, hadn't even realized how deeply it had come to affect her. "I've enjoyed it and I've enjoyed heightening the pain of my victims. I haven't tortured often, but the fact that I have at all is enough."