STORY: "Destiny's Child" (46 pages)  Bishop and his sister Shard have a reunion in their home town of Las Vegas.  The disturbed mutant Preacher is led there by his precognitive visions.  He is followed by the Hound, who captures Bishop, Shard and Preacher and takes them to Operation: Zero Tolerance.  OZT's experiments on Shard turn her into an energy being.  The heroes escape.

What you need to know:
Shard and fellow guest star Wild Child are both members of the government team X-Factor at this point.  The Hound is a government-created mutant-hunter who had also recently popped up in X-Factor.  Lots of references to X-Factor, very few of which have any bearing on the X-Men.

We're told that Bishop and Shard were born in Las Vegas.

Bishop's lack of interest in his sister before this story is explained by his not accepting her as anything more than a holographic copy of the real Shard.  He changes his mind after meeting her.

Shard gets turned into a "photon based life form", which is all very fascinating if you read X-Factor.  The pseudoscience count is really high in this story - one page contains the lines "the encrypted data parameters constituting her mind field" and the ever popular "double the high-spectrum intensity of the laser-pulse barrage."

One of Shard's memories of her own time has Colossus in it, so presumably he survived the Sentinel domination of North America in that timeline. (As opposed to the original Days of Futures Past timeline, where he was killed.)

Preacher's final vision in this issue is foreshadowing the arrival of Onslaught.

Comments:
Er... yes.  What the hell is this doing in Uncanny X-Men's annual when it plainly ought to be in X-Factor?  A major change for an X-Factor character, an X-Factor villain as antagonist, and not much X-Men material at all apart from re-establishing the relationship between Bishop and Shard.

The original Preacher story in the 1995 Annual was a pretty good effort.  This isn't - a bland, boring effort which labours mightily to make us believe that the Hound is an interesting villain but falls flat on its face.  The art is competent but no more, and on the whole this is an entirely missable issue.

FEATURE CHARACTERS
Bishop (last in X-Men vol 2 #57; next in XSE #1-4, then in X-Men vol 2 #58, then in the X-Men story in Marvel Holiday Special 1996, then in Uncanny X-Men #339; also in flashbacks between flashbacks in XSE #1; also in flashback between flashbacks in XSE #3)
Storm (last in X-Men vol 2 #57; next in XSE #4, then in Uncanny X-Men #338)

GUEST STARS
Shard (between X-Factor #126 and XSE #1; becomes a photon-based energy being; also in flashbacks between flashbacks in XSE #1; also in flashback between flashbacks in XSE #3)
Wild Child (between X-Factor #126 and Marvel Fanfare vol 2 #6)

VILLAINS
The Hound (last in X-Factor #123; no further appearances)
Operation: Zero Tolerance (last in X-Factor #123; next in Uncanny X-Men #333)
Bastion (last in flashback in Machine Man/Bastion '98; next in Uncanny X-Men #333)
Dr L Stephens (a government scientist; first and only appearance)

OTHER CHARACTERS
Preacher (last in Uncanny X-Men '95; no further appearances)
Amazon and Recoil (both behind the scenes in flashback following flashback in XSE #1 and preceding flashback in Bishop #3; both also behind the scenes following flashback in XSE #2; no further appearances)

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