Mr Sinister (AKA Nathaniel Essex AKA Michael Milbury AKA Robert Windsor AKA Nathan Milbury)
History: Sinister was born Nathaniel Essex in London, England during the early 19th century. He had a quiet home life as a child and was predisposed to spending long spans of time by himself, quite involved and happy. As he grew it was obvious that Essex was extremely intelligent and a voracious learner by nature. He became obsessed with Darwin's Theory of Evolution and turned his own pursuits toward biology and genetics, earning his PhD as well as a Doctorate of Medicine at a relatively young age. Essex found, increasingly, that Darwin and their other contemporaries were stymied by moral constraints and unwilling to take their research and knowledge to the next level. Frustrated, he broke off from the scientific community at large and began following his own theories of human evolution.
In 1859 Essex discovered that humanity was mutating. The mutations stemmed from what he named "Essex Factors"--flags that he had located inside the coding of the human genome. But since breaking the genetic code of a human had never been accomplished and was general thought of to be impossible, his work was dismissed and mocked. Between the abuse from his peers and the death of his young son Adam (due to numerous birth defects), Essex was driven into isolation and obsession. He lost his tether to rational moral thought completely. Lacking funding for further studies, Essex hired a group of thugs to kidnap people off the streets of London to use for his experiments. He even dug up the body of his deceased son.
Essex understood that the mutations he had traced back to humanity's very DNA would transform mankind. He believed that through selective breeding he could actually cause the rapid evolution of superhumans. But due to his unorthodox and immoral experimentation to gain this end, he was shunned absolutely. The Royal Society dismissed him and his wife, Rebecca, turned her back on him. These rejections ultimately proved too much for Essex. When he met an immortal mutant named Apocalypse he allied himself to the god-like being; Apocalypse granted him longevity (in the form of increased healing due to a certain molecular control of his own body) in order to be able to continue his studies in return for Essex's servitude. However, this "gift" left Essex physical mutated, his skin silver and his eyes completely red. With the loss of his humanity and the loss of his wife--who died in a miscarriage triggered by the shock of discovering Nathaniel and the true horror of the things he'd done--Essex took his new name, the last word on her cold lips.
Sinister.
Apocalypse’s first order to Sinister was to create a plague that would wipe out the weak from the world, a mass culling. Sinister refused. He had reasons for doing the things that he had done and would not agree to destruction simply for its own sake. He created the plague but attuned it to Apocalypse's genetic code and drove the mutant back into hibernation. Done with the memories and resources of England, Sinister stayed long enough only to see Darwin buried in 1882 before leaving for the United States where he spent the next decade conducting numerous genetic experiments under the name Michael Milbury, as whom he ran an obstetrics clinic in New York.
In 1891 Sinister met Gambit and Courier, two mutants traveled back from the future and stuck in his present. He struck a deal with the two and in exchange for a surgery that would allow Gambit to take them back to their future, Sinister acquired tissue and blood samples from the shape-shifter Courier. Using these and because of his healing abilities, he was able to augment his own genetic code and gained the ability to control his form at will.
No longer reliant on make-up to cover his mutation, Sinister left the United States to travel and spent years abroad collecting genetic information on mutants, studying family lines and the manifestation of mutations back through generations.
In the 1930's he moved back to California under the name of Dr Robert Windsor and set back to gathering test subjects instead of chasing them down. He met a woman named Faye Livingstone, a popular radio personality of the time, and was taken with her. For the first time in his long years since Rebecca, Sinister remembered the attachments of human emotion. He carefully let her into his life and discovered that Faye carried an "Essex Factor" (or X-Factor, as it was coming to be known) latent in her genes. She would pass it onto her children. Torn between his love for her and his want to see her reproduce with a viable mutant genetic strain, Sinister grew distracted and uncareful. Faye found his laboratory and his secrets and he knew he could not let her go. He kept her his prisoner and broke her mind and spirit over the following months of degrading experimentation; Sinister thought that by breaking Faye, he could break his own emotional ties to her. He was wrong.
One night without word Faye was released. She never married or bore children because of some shred of love that she still carried for Sinister; he had sealed his own fate on what could have been her genetic legacy. Eventually Faye ended up in San Diego in a nursing home, riddled with cancer. Sinister--despite every assurance to himself that she was nothing to him--visited her once a year without fail until she died in his arms. Once again his human attachment was buried beneath a marble marker and six feet of earth though that could never be deep enough; it was Faye's latent mutant gene that gifted Sinister with telekinesis. He would carry a part of her forever.
As if somehow counterbalancing a weakness, Sinister left the States after Faye's death and worked with--if not allied himself to the cause of--the Nazis. He used the concentration camps as pools of constantly shifting genetic information and would offer candy to children as bribes for blood samples. Sinister actually scared the Nazis that he spent time among; they would call him "Nosferatu" behind his back because of both the blood collection and his pallor.
With more than a century of genetic records and experiments testing both humans and mutants, Sinister returned to his roots. In England he took a position as a Biology teacher at Oxford University to spend time reconnecting to the newest generation and bleeding his own ideologies to intelligent young minds. The two most notable of his students included Charles Xavier and Moira MacTaggart. It was from Charles--the future 'Professor X' of the X-Men--that Sinister was able to collect a sample of genetic code and thus shift his own DNA to further include telepathy in his growing personal arsenal.
Sinister was also involved in another war, showing up in Vietnam. There he kidnapped both soldiers and villagers alike--because who would think comment on one more casualty?--to run tests on. His presence became known as the "White Devil," the legend of a pale terror that snatched people from the woods or their very beds, never to be seen again.
Whatever human emotion or moral compass that had resurfaced in Sinister with the inclusion of Faye Livingstone into his life, it had gone. He was again devoted to the nearly compulsive collection of cataloging mutant genetic lines in order to breed a superior race.
Sinister visited Xavier's school, interested in the young mutants that the man was gathering--some of whom he had tracked from birth, had tracked their parents, and grandparents. But it was one student in particular who caught his eye while he was there, the young Jean Grey. Obtaining a piece of her hair, Sinister had enough of her genetic makeup to trace her lineage and came to the conclusion that she could be the beginning of an actualized line of the superior mutant genetic code that he had been working toward. She was a piece of his puzzle. He stayed far away from Jean, only ever speaking to her the once, but tracked her whereabouts and obsessed over her part in his larger goal.
He decided to take a more active approach when he heard that Jean had left Xavier for William Stryker. Sinister knew little of the major or his projects but knew that the man could not possibly be the protective and stifling influence that Xavier had been to Jean. He needed her safe or if not safe then he needed good enough samples as to have a back up.
Having procured government funding for more mundane projects that Sinister funneled discreetly into other things, Sinister used his connections in order to reach Stryker and offer his services as a doctor and geneticist as well as a mutant enthusiast under his current human identity, Dr. Nathan Milbury.
Power Description: Sinister has a few powers at his disposal that he has culled from mutants over the last two centuries. He has a massively increased healing factor that not only grants him a near-immortal life-span but the ability to heal from almost any wound. This is a conscious process so whether or not Sinister could survive something like a bullet to the head is in question; he's never tried to prove the theory. Hand-in-hand with this molecular manipulation is Sinister's ability to shape-shift, completely changing his body at the most basic levels.
Telekinesis is also available to Sinister. It lets him interact with objects through his mind as though he was touching them and has the ability to be quite controlled and precise--he could, possibly, do surgery using his telekinesis. In fact he is more comfortable using his telekinesis at this less macro level, though Sinister can manipulate larger items (including himself) and generate concussive forces if he needs to.
Also, telepathy. Sinister is an accomplished telepath though he specializes in only a few notable talents that are most useful to him. He can cloak his mind, which hides his mutant abilities from any other telepath and sets up a separate and unique mundane psychic signature with which he can hide behind. He can create telepathic illusions--completely immersing his victim in a world that looks, feels, smells and sounds real--as well as produce a sort of forced compliance in a victim that forces them to obey his command, no matter how extreme. The outcome of these talents all depend on the psychic shields and abilities of the people he would use them on. He would not be the most powerful telepath in camp but he has a knack for finesse.
Personality: Sinister is obsessive. He has spent almost two hundreds years following a single goal: the furthering of mutant genetics, trying to bring mutants to their highest evolutionary point. He is an outstandingly patient man who is willing enough to put plans into motion that he knows will not come to fruition for years, even decades, to follow family lines through generations. As such his attention to detail is close to manic and Sinister can be quite compulsive at times. Generally he is a gentleman--if capable of being a little haughty at time--but Sinister's moral compass is quite broken. He would never commit evil for its own sake but he is "the end justifies the means" type of man to the core.