Editing Index (section)

====BACKGROUND====
Unlike most mutants, Shannon Hartley's powers did not develop until his early adulthood, halfway through his third year at Embry-Riddle University. During an intense cram session, Shannon complained of a splitting headache--and then passed out. He regained awareness a week later in the infirmary of the Xavier Institute, where Henry McCoy and Emma Frost informed him that his X-gene had activated--though not without some complications. Shannon's body had been consumed in a flare of psionic energy, and now existed as "an endoskeleton of psionic force suffused with psychometric plasma." In fact, Doctor McCoy had been required to isolate Shannon's energy form within a containment unit until he gained enough control over his powers to stabilize himself. For his part, Shannon was overjoyed at the revelation that he was X-gene positive. Not even the discovery that his physical body had been utterly destroyed--forcing him to interact with others only through direct mind-to-mind communication or psionic projections--could dampen his enthusiasm.

After his release from the infirmary, he was enrolled in Ms. Frost's telepathy training class, where it was eventually discovered that his powers went far beyond telepathy. Freed from the constraints of a physical body, Shannon (now calling himself Index) found that his mind had been greatly enhanced, granting him superhuman reasoning and computational abilities. A set of new senses had developed as well, allowing Index to perceive and emit frequencies well into the radio end of the electromagnetic spectrum. Finally, Index could control and communicate with machines, generate sophisticated illusions from ambient psionic energy, alter memories, and disintegrate an object by "subtracting the information content from its psychometric pattern" (which is how he "eats" and "breathes"). In his time at the Institute, Index idolized Xorn--even going so far as to model his own appearance after his hero--and was profoundly disillusioned when Xorn revealed himself to be yet another maniac bent on world domination. The assault by "Danger" was the final straw and Index left the school to venture out on his own, convinced that the world's remaining mutants were too vulnerable while confined to one location. He also felt that once trained to use their powers safely, the students had a responsibility to leave the school and get to work on forging the world into a paradise for mutants, while covertly neutralizing any threats--whether human, mutant, or other--to that glorious future. With that purpose in mind, Index remade himself into a kind of information broker, using his special abilities to break into restricted databases and then selling the information within to interested parties. After singling out such targets as Advanced Idea Mechanics, HYDRA and the U-Men as major threats to world order (and by extension, the mutant population) and frustrating a significant fraction of their designs, Index made a series of implacable foes, with his personal safety guaranteed only by his skillful misdirection and concealment of his electronic intrusions. But somewhere he made a mistake, and the narrow evasion of a subsequent attempt on his life in Seattle forced him to relocate to Cocoa Beach, Florida. Unwilling to request assistance from the X-Men and convinced that working alone might not be beneficial in the long-term, in a sudden flash of insight Index decided to resolve both dilemmas at a stroke by volunteering for SHIELD duty. While SHIELD has kept him strictly out of the public eye and assigned to gathering domestic intelligence, Index has heard that reassignment to the Florida-based Initiative team is imminent....