Futher Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix

London, England, 1859: The scientist Nathaniel Essex and his wife, Rebecca, are awaiting the birth of their second child. Their first son, Adam, passed away at the age of four from numerous birth defects. The loss of his son drove Nathaniel Essex deeper into his work, and he became obsessed Darwin's theory of evolution. He rejects the moral doubts of his religious wife about his experiments and openly states that there is no god. During a lecture in the Royal Society, Nathaniel claims that humanity contains the potential of evolving immensely fast, due to what he calls “Essex Factors”, predicting the emergence of mutants as an evolutionary breakthrough. When he shows the Royal Society a result of an experiment, the members are outraged and brand Essex himself as a monster. As he leaves angrily, Essex says that if becoming a monster is what is required for science to progress, then so be it.