11:58pm. November 4th, 1989. He is born first.Aleksandr never met his birth mother, but always assumed her abandonment was a blessing in disguise. His twin sister must be worth more than he was, not knowing where she ended up or why they were separated so young. He remembers flashes of his life with her, but nothing concrete enough to go after. He didn’t want to go after it. He had Jakub Mišalko, the man who took him in and raised him as his own.Growing up near the rivers of Slovakia, Alek was taught how to fish and defend himself. At age 7, Jakub took Alek to France, where he would spend the rest of his childhood and adolescence under the care of Ludwig Porada. Jakub knew exactly what Alek was and what he could be capable of— it was nothing compared to what Jakub himself could do. Ludwig made sure Alek learned the ways of mutant supremacy and mastered his abilities the second they manifested.Earning the codename Woltazs — meaning Voltage — as soon as his electromagnetic abilities manifested, he was trained in combat and lived and breathed the ideals of Cobalt, an organization he believed took care of mutant-kind and sought to bring justice and conquest for all mutants. When he is 15 and actively working as an agent of Cobalt, Alek is assigned to a special task force team called Killjoys along with four other mutants around his own age. Ludwig put him in charge of not only the group itself, but also on keeping some of them in line— not all who joined the organization came willingly, he knew this, so he was meant to keep two agents in particular from deviating: Iratus and Envy. His connection with Envy in particular was strange to him, almost like they both knew what the other would do or say without any sort of verbal or physical hint.During the five years Alek spends with the Killjoys, a lot of his world views change, mostly due to Iratus’ influence and Envy’s ever-growing desire to run away. His belief on Cobalt’s ideals falter and shift as time goes on and he’s exposed to the real world, to a view different from the ones he grew up preaching. Soon, Alek was quietly working alongside his Killjoys to dismantle Cobalt from the inside. Unfortunately, their work wouldn’t bear any fruits, as the X-Men arrive weeks after Alek’s — and Envy’s — 20th birthday to take down the organization and rescue the young mutants in its grasp. Alek manages to go by unnoticed, given as dead by the rescuers and other fellow agents.He settled in the Tuscany region of Italy with the few items and riches he had been gathering throughout the years, some he had stolen from Cobalt, some he had kept from Jakub. Not having a purpose, not having a mission or assignment made his process of assimilation into regular human life much harder, but he persisted. For years of his life, Alek – now going mostly by Ale – taught self-defense and fishing classes, taking care of any mutants he found in his path, giving them shelter if needed. At one point, Alek had a small school for mutants himself, happy to aid the youth with his knowledge. At heart, he always knew he was a teacher.His school does catch the eye of a particular mutant, one known as Emma Frost. Alek does accept Emma’s aid, making his small and generally undetected school a little bigger, a little more protected. He chooses to ignore the look she gives him, one he had seen only in one person before— Envy.