STORY: "Soul Possessions, part 1 of 2: The Butterfly and the Hawk" (22 pages)  Revanche returns to Hong Kong to confront Matsuo Tsurayaba.  On her request, Matsuo kills her rather than leave her to die from the Legacy Virus.

What you need to know:
Revanche dies, obviously.  So much for that arc, although it lingers on for another issue while the loose ends are resolved.

Revanche tears out her bionic eyes, a rather obscure and long-forgotten plotline.  Basically, Betsy Braddock (in her original body) had been blinded by Slaymaster, a Captain Britain villain.  Mojo and Spiral gave her bionic eyes (against her will), which they used to monitor the X-Men.  All of this became a moot point after the X-Men supposedly "died" in Dallas and became invisible to cameras.  Since Revanche is basically Kwannon in Betsy's body, she gets stuck with the robot eyes.

Spiral and Matsuo give us a whole load of flashbacks, designed to disentangle the whole Psylocke/Revanche mess.  The thrust is that Matsuo and Kwannon were lovers, but Kwannon worked as Nyoirin's bodyguard.  When Matsuo was hired to assassinate Nyoirin, he fought Kwannon, who ended up falling off a cliff.  Matsuo abandoned his attempt on Nyoirin's life, and Nyoirin allowed him to take Kwannon away to see if she could be healed.  The flashbacks continue in issue #32 as we see how Psylocke ties into all this.

We get some attempts to explain why this doesn't quite match what we heard first time round.  Nyoirin's diary is dismissed as "fictitious"; Matsuo tries rather unconvincingly to explain why he didn't mention any of this when Revanche and Psylocke visited him a few months back; and Revanche says that she's only regained her own memories of events because her telepathic powers have increased thanks to the Legacy Virus.  (That last one actually makes a neat kind of sense, since the Legacy Virus is meant to kill you by driving your powers out of control.)

Spiral muses about her motivations for messing about with Psylocke and Revanche.  It boils down to saying that she's bitter, twisted and slightly nuts.

Psylocke and Archangel are growing closer, building up to their romance subplot, which ran for a few years.

Professor X reveals that the Massachusetts Academy is now the property of the X-Men, because Emma Frost left instructions for it to be handed over in the event of her being incapacitated.  This is, of course, an attempt to justify the Academy being in the X-Men's hands for the upcoming launch of Generation X.  It doesn't entirely work, because (a) Emma was the headmistress of the Massachusetts Academy, not its owner, and (b) by this point she'd been comatose for some three years - so you'd expect her attorneys to have acted on this request long ago.

Gambit is worried because Rogue is acting distantly from him after their recent trip to New Orleans in the Gambit vol 1 miniseries.  During that, Rogue touched Bella Donna and absorbed her memories, which may or may not have resulted in her learning things Gambit would prefer she didn't know.

Comments:
A shameless attempt to take a horribly convoluted storyline and kick it into touch.  Two issues to make sense of this mess, correct the continuity errors and still deliver a coherent storyline is a pretty demanding remit, and it's to Fabian Nicieza's credit that he manages to wring some sort of dramatic finale from the whole mess.  There's some very obvious rewriting of history - tacitly admitted when Spiral refers to Psylocke as a "continuity glitch" - but at least there's a brave attempt to explain it.

Better than it really has any right to be, to be honest.  It's still a deck clearing exercise at the end of the day, but it's brazen enough to get away with it.

FEATURE CHARACTERS
Professor X (last in X-Factor Annual #9), Gambit (last in What If? vol 2 #60), Rogue (last in X-Men Unlimited vol 1 #4), Archangel, the Beast and Psylocke

SUPPORTING CHARACTER
Revanche (last in issue #28; dies; also as Kwannon in flashback which is her chronologically earliest appearance, preceding the flashbacks in the next issue)

VILLAINS
Spiral (last in X-Factor Annual #7)
Matsuo Tsurayaba (last in issue #23; also in flashback which is his chronologically earliest appearance, preceding the flashback in the next issue)
Lord Nyoirin (in flashback which is his chronologically earliest appearance, preceding the flashback in the next issue)

Written: 31 October 2004

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