Here's everything you need to know about The Children of the Vault - the greatest threat to the X-Men and the entire mutant race. Jonathan Hickman's X-Men relaunch has been a phenomenal success, with the X-Men once again becoming some of Marvel's best-selling books.
The key to the X-Men relaunch seems to lie in Hickman's clear love of the franchise and its lore. Hickman shows absolutely no hesitation in digging deep into the X-Men's convoluted continuity, and he seems to quite enjoy the occasional retcon; rewriting Moira MacTaggert into a secret mutant, for example. Sometimes that does make certain aspects of his comics pretty hard to follow for new readers, though.
Take the case of this week's X-Men #5. Several issues ago, the X-Men liberated prisoners who were being experimented upon by scientists attempting to wipe out the mutant race. It turned out one of the captives wasn't a mutant at all, but a member of the so-called Children of the Vault. Now, after several weeks hunting them, the X-Men have finally tracked them down. But just who are the Children of the Vault?
Introducing The Children Of The Vault
The Children of the Vault were introduced in 2006's X-Men #188-193. They were an evolutionary offshoot of humanity created by scientists who believed the human race was about to face an imminent extinction level event. These scientists believed the key to survival lay in establishing a contained environment where time moved at an accelerated pace, allowing for the people contained within to evolve faster. In order to conduct this insane experiment, they purchased a Chilean storage ship called the Conquistador. They sailed the Conquistador into international waters and dropped an anchor there, converting its interior into the Vault; they left it waiting for 30 years - equivalent to 60,000 years inside the temporal field.
The Children of the Vault are neither mutant nor human, but rather should be compared to the likes of the Eternals and the Deviants. After millennia of genetic drift, they have come to count as an entirely separate species, with technologies that are just as formidable as super-powers. The Vault was opened when the Scarlet Witch unleashed a wave of energy that wiped out the powers of 98 percent of the world's mutants, known as the Decimation. The Conquistador's sensors mistakenly read the energy flare as the prophesied extinction event, and the Children of the Vault emerged to claim the world they believed they were destined to rule.
The Children of the Vault initially attempted to keep their existence secret, but that proved harder than they'd hoped; Sabretooth was on hand to witness their emergence from the Conquistador. Sabretooth soon realized the Children of the Vault would go to any lengths to kill him - they used a singularity bomb to destroy an entire city block on one occasion - and he fled to the X-Men for help. The Children attempted to kill the X-Men as well, by brainwashing two mutants into attacking the X-Mansion, then sent in one of their own - a technopath named Serafina - to infiltrate the school. Unfortunately that too went wrong, because Wolverine was able to sense her; her cloak was too effective, creating a blank spot with no smells or sounds. The conflict escalated at a shocking rate, as the Children of the Vault attempted to use the Conquistador to launch a devastating strike. Fortunately, the X-Men were able to neutralize them, and the Children, faking their deaths. They secretly reestablished the Vault in Ecuador, inside the hulk of a Master Mold Sentinel.
The Return Of The Children Of The Vault
The Children of the Vault were next seen in 2010's X-Men: Legacy #238-241, when Magneto detected mysterious electromagnetic fluctuations and decided to accompany a group of X-Men to Mumbi, India. Although only a few years had passed on Earth, millennia had inside the Vault, and the Children had moved on from seeking to conquer Earth. They had decided Earth was too far gone, and instead had begun to build a city in interdimensional space. Known as the Corridor, this city had one problem; the Children of the Vault preferred to use solar power, and there are no suns between the dimensions. As one of the Children explained it, "There is no sun in the void, no natural source of heat or light for us to draw on. The decay of transdimensional particles fuels our generators, but the processing is dangerous and the waste highly toxic." They resolved this issue by tethering the Corridor to Earth, and the waste pollutants were discharging in Mumbai, generating devastating storms and causing complete neural shutdowns in people nearby.
By this point, the Children of the Vault had evolved again. Their technology was now integrated into their bodies, giving each member of the Children their own distinctive super-powers. They developed a new Angelfire unit, powered by thirty Children of the Vault who possessed energy manipulation abilities. Unfortunately for the Children, one of their number - a rebellious teenager called Luz - didn't want to play in her part in all this. She escaped to Earth, and sought sanctuary among Magneto's team of X-Men, even becoming attracted to the young X-Man named Indra. Her actions ultimately led the Corridor's technology to fail, and it began to collide with our dimension, wreaking havoc in Mumbai. The X-Men successfully destroyed the anchor connecting it to Earth, and it was launched into the Multiverse, adrift.
It's important to note that, while these Children of the Vault were different characters, they were certainly tied to the originals; they had access to the same technology and weapons. They also had tech that effectively allowed them to become immortal, meaning that the villains the X-Men had already fought - notably Serafina, who only Wolverine could track - could easily still be alive, even though over 6,000 years would have passed for them.
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The Hickman era has reframed the Children of the Vault as the greatest threat the mutant race has ever faced. Powers of X #6 revealed that the mutant-human war is just a distraction. Mutantdom is the natural evolutionary successor to humanity, as Xavier always claimed. But as science and technology develops, humanity ceases to live in a natural environment. Instead, inevitably, humans use science to evolve into a post-human state known as Homo novissima, a race who are destined to wipe both man and mutant out. And it looks as the Children of the Vault have become Homo novissima. The X-Men will be tempted to conduct exactly the same kind of race-war against the Children of the Vault that humans have always conducted against mutants; but hopefully they will be able to look beyond the threat, and remember the example of Luz, the girl who proved that the Children are people too.