E Is for Extinction
For a brief time after Magneto’s ambitions were quelled, Genosha once again entered a brief period of uncertain peace—peace immediately disrupted by the machinations of Charles Xavier’s sinister “twin,” the powerful and twisted psychic Cassandra Nova. Having used the inheritor of the Trask family to access a hidden Sentinel Master Mold hidden in Ecuador, Nova launched a force of Wild Sentinels to commit mutant genocide: making landfall at Genosha, in just hours Nova’s Sentinels reduced a population of 16.5 million mutants to less than a thousand.
Genosha became a dead memorial to the dreams of mutant statehood: cordoned off by foreign powers, the X-Men, Magneto’s Brotherhood (with their leader being presumed to have been killed in the genocide, but he actually survived in disguise as the mutant Xorn, it’s… a long story), and other forces attempted to recover potential survivors of the Genoshan Genocide in the months after Nova’s plans for the world were foiled. With Genosha in ruins and cut off from the outside world, those that stayed to rebuild remained, slowly but surely, piece by piece, reclaiming the island into some semblance of a home among its horrors.
