"Kitty's Fairy Tale" (or, as the cover would have it: "And now for something completely different"
After the events of the last story, the X-Men are cleaning up debris around the mansion. I am actually a little bit unclear on this, because there was a a previous time the mansion suffered damage and spent several issues being cleaned-up. Basically, the X-Men are always anticipating or recovering from some type of damage. But all of this is just background.
This story is a fairy tale, told by the young Kitty Pryde to the even younger Ilya Rasputin, (who, at some point in the future, would be magically aged up to be Kitty's peer due to time travel because this is what happens with the X-Men). The fairy tale has the X-Men in it, in various guises: Kitty and Colossus are pirates, Storm is a genie and Wolverine is a monster of some sort. It also has an early cameo by Lockheed the Dragon, here as a full-sized dragon based on the X-Men's SR-71 Blackbird. The story also has the Phoenix in it, with the action hinging around an attempt to heal the Dark Phoenix by a crystal ball containing Jean Grey's real soul. (NB: the original, dramatic Phoenix story, and all of its many amendations, are confusing enough on their own, here it is a fictionalized version within the story) This leads to a happy ending, as all fairy tales have, with Jean Grey healed and the fairy tale X-Men happy. The story then ends a second time, as the X-Men reveal to Kitty that they were listening in on her story.
It is cute, it is charming, and as promised, it is something different.
Not totally different though, because this story recaps the Dark Phoenix storyline, which was already becoming one of the defining storylines of the X-Men. There are two reasons for that, and the first is practical: in a time before trade paperbacks and when comic book stores were still scarce, and when comics were getting new casual readers all the time, there needed to be an update or recap to past stories. Since the Dark Phoenix story would continue to be woven in and out of other stories, this allowed Chris Claremont to inform new readers of what happened in back issues from a whole 18 months ago. The second reason is less practical, and would be one of the things that would start causing difficulty for some readers: Chris Claremont started getting more and more involved in his own stories, and would refer to them on a recursive level, with discussion of past events, and retelling and revisiting stories, becoming heavier and heavier. Here, it is light and charming, but before long, it would become less so.
But for now, we can enjoy a simple fairy tale before the next story starts...