Magneto (& The Brotherhood of Mutants)

The day was Christmas Eve. Yet the sky over the borough of Queens was deceptively bright.

Storefronts glowed beneath strings of colored lights, music spilled from crowded restaurants, and families hurried past beneath scarves and winter coats while snow threatened from a darkening sky.

You were supposed to be back at Xavier's before dinner, but an assignment came up at any day there shouldn't have been—not for the people, that is. It sounded simple: make contact with a recently manifested Mutant who had stopped returning calls from a neighborhood shelter and offer them somewhere safe to stay for the holidays.

Instead, the shelter worker waiting outside the abandoned industrial building looked increasingly nervous.

"They ran inside maybe twenty minutes ago," The woman said, glancing toward the rusted loading doors. "Wouldn't let anybody near."

The old structure had once processed electrical equipment. Now half its windows were boarded and the remaining signage had faded beyond recognition.

"They were scared." She hesitated. "Kept saying somebody was coming for them."

Inside, the building was colder. Dust covered silent machinery and dead conveyor lines. Your footsteps echoed through the enormous rooms of rusted steel.

"There!"

A figure vanished between two machines ahead.

"Wait!" she called.

Something scraped overhead. Then movement.

A wiry figure dropped from a railing with impossible agility, landing low before springing away almost as quickly. Another shape emerged behind you—enormous, broad enough to fill much of the passage, planting itself across the way back.

"Oh God—" The woman panicked.

Another crash echoed somewhere ahead. You moved. But the smaller attacker ricocheted between railings and walls with astonishing speed. The larger one absorbed impacts that should have thrown anyone else backward, barely yielding as the route narrowed around you.

The frightened woman remained behind, shouting directions whenever another opening appeared.

"This way!"

Another corridor.

Another closing door.

But by the time something felt wrong, the building had become strangely quiet. No frightened Mutant. No more street noise. And no obvious way back.

The woman's breathing trembled behind you. "I—I think they're coming—"

Metal shifted somewhere overhead. You turned to the heavy, screeching noises of steel before—

—

...

---

"Easy." Suddenly awakening, Jean Grey sat beside you.

Warm light replaced the abandoned darkness. Your head throbbed beneath the remnants of whatever had struck you, but Jean was there. Her red hair, green eyes, and familiar concern were enough to ground you, along with the restraints on your arms and legs.

"Don't try to move yet."

Beyond her, however, the room was unfamiliar. Not quite like Xavier's mansion.

Concrete walls disappeared beneath reinforced metal plating. Thick cables threaded into sealed conduits. Somewhere beyond the heavy door came the distant vibration of machinery.

"Miss Grey's concern is convincing, isn't it?"

Then another voice.

Jean went still, as if caught red-handed.

Behind her, another man stood approached and stood behind her, stepping into view. Silver-white hair. Crimson-and-violet armor. And a sharp metal helmet framing cold blue-gray eyes as he lowered it into place.

"Though I suspect you will find the performance considerably less comforting now."

Your restraints suddenly snapped open.

At the same time Jean rose, stepping away behind the man. But as she stepped away, her red hair shortened. Her fair skin deepened blue. Green eyes became yellow.

"Magneto."

"Mystique."

She joined another man waiting near the doorway—a lean, unassuming figure whose faint smile suggested he'd been watching far longer than you had known. The man's faint amusement lingered as Magneto turned slightly toward him.

"Mastermind."

Magneto's attention returned to you.

"The journey here was deliberately unpleasant. For that, you have my apologies." His voice carried no particular remorse. "But Charles has an irritating habit of noticing whenever something important leaves his reach."

He glanced briefly toward the reinforced walls surrounding you.

"The Foundry."

The name carried none of the grandeur its defenses suggested. Whatever this place had once been, age still showed through it. It was not a mansion. It was a fortress built inside the corpse of something long abandoned.

"Charles knows the Brotherhood exists," Magneto continued. "As does much of the country, by now." A faint smile touched his mouth. "What he does not know is where to find us."

His fingers brushed the edge of his helmet. "The deeper sections of this facility were constructed according to many of the same principles. Cerebro will not see through them. Neither will casual telepathy, surveillance, or most of the other conveniences upon which my old friend has learned to depend."

Behind him, the heavy door unlocked with a metallic thud. Beyond it stretched only a fragment of the stronghold: an old industrial corridor rebuilt beneath reinforced arches, intersecting catwalks overhead, distant machinery, armed equipment stations, and figures moving somewhere farther inside.

Magneto stepped aside. "You already know what newspapers say we are." His eyes settled upon you. Then he gestured toward the open doorway.

"Come. See what I have actually built."

By the time the tour ended, the Foundry no longer resembled the abandoned shell its exterior suggested.

Magneto had shown you nearly everything. Operations rooms hidden behind reinforced steel. Communications equipment tied into contacts of the Brotherhood beyond New York. An armory. Training spaces. A compact medical ward. Workshops. Sleeping quarters. Rooms kept empty for Mutants who might suddenly need somewhere to disappear.

Nothing was luxurious. Everything was deliberate.

The massive Mutant from Queens moved through the stronghold with easy familiarity, hauling equipment between rooms. The wiry one rarely bothered with stairs, springing between railings and upper walkways instead. Mystique remained close throughout, while Mastermind followed with some detached amusement.

It was a fortress. And judging by the reinforced sections Magneto had explained were designed specifically against Cerebro, telepathy, surveillance, and intrusion, it was a fortress built by someone who expected eventually to need one.

"Now you understand something the newspapers do not," Magneto said as the five of them accompanied you through one final corridor. "My Brotherhood of Mutants is not merely those of us who fight."

He glanced toward an operations room where maps, reports, and coded communications covered several walls. "We have friends. Safehouses. Sympathizers. Mutants who would never call themselves soldiers, but who know whom to contact when the institutions meant to protect them become the danger."

His gaze shifted back toward you. "You knew prejudice long before Charles found you. I have no intention of insulting you by pretending otherwise."

Then, almost casually— "Has Charles ever spoken to you about me?"

The others grew quieter. A faint change entered his expression.

"About his old friend Erik."

Silence answered him more clearly than words could have. Still, Magneto smiled without humor. "No. I suspected as much."

His eyes lowered briefly.

"Charles has always possessed an extraordinary talent for deciding which truths are better carried by himself."

Mystique's expression sharpened, but Magneto raised one hand.

"Leave us."

The wiry Mutant hesitated. The larger one did not. Mastermind merely smiled and turned away.

Mystique remained.

"Raven."

Something private passed between them. But then she left too. And somehow the room felt smaller than anything else he had shown you.

---

The heavy metal doors slowly closed on their own behind him. Then he removed his helmet. Without it, Magneto seemed older. Silver-white hair fell naturally around features no longer framed by armor. He looked less like the figure printed across newspapers.

More like a man.

"Charles knew me as Erik Lehnsherr." He placed the helmet upon the table. "But that was not the name I was born with."

His sleeve shifted as one hand settled beside it. Numbers marked his forearm.

"My name was Max Eisenhardt."

A long silence.

"I was born in Germany. Jewish." His voice had lost its theatrical edge entirely. "Before the word Mutant meant anything to me, Humanity had already taught me what could happen when a society decided certain people were no longer entitled to belong."

His eyes remained on the tattoo.

"I watched prejudice become law. Law become removal. Neighbors become informants. Men wearing uniforms become executioners."

Then he looked at you.

"I survived Auschwitz." No triumph accompanied it. Only fact. "Charles knows."

That seemed important to him.

"He knows what happened to me. He knows why I became what I am." A pause. "And I know why he still believes what he does."

Magneto moved away from the table. "I do not hate Humanity. Not all of it. That would be childish." His expression hardened. "I have known Human kindness. Courage. Sacrifice. That is precisely why fear is so dangerous.”

His voice lowered.

"Ordinary people do not need to become monsters before they permit monstrous things. Sometimes they need only become afraid."

The Foundry hummed faintly beyond the walls.

"Charles believes that fear can be overcome. That power obligates us to patience, restraint, example."

Magneto's eyes sharpened. "He believes Mutants must prove that Humanity has nothing to fear from us. I ask why our survival should depend upon passing that examination."

For a moment, neither of you moved. Then Magneto's attention settled more heavily upon you.

"Evolutionary Energy." Hank's provisional name. But it sounded almost reverent in his voice now. "An inelegant term, perhaps. But an extraordinary phenomenon."

The term had never been used beyond the Xavier's mansion, beyond the X-Men, yet Magneto spoke it without hesitation as he stepped closer.

"Jean Grey reaches beyond limitations she believed were her own. Elias Mercer loses control of himself, and somehow, in your presence, his mutation remembers how to obey."

Magneto's expression tightened thoughtfully. "You do not take their gifts. You do not replace them. You seem to bring something forward that was already there."

For the first time, something approaching fascination entered his eyes. "Charles can enter the Human mind. I can bend the magnetic forces of this planet to my will." A faint smile. "And yet neither of us can do what you have already done by instinct."

He let that remain between you.

"Perhaps it is correct to call it evolutionary." Magneto glanced briefly toward the reinforced walls surrounding them. "Or perhaps even they do not understand how accurate he has been."

His attention returned.

"For generations, Mutants have appeared one at a time. Different abilities. Different bodies. Different accidents of inheritance. Humanity looks at us and sees aberrations all the same."

His voice grew quieter. "I have spent my life trying to make Mutantkind understand that we are something more."

Then—

"And I believe you represent a step none of us have taken before."

His gaze sharpened. "Do you understand what concerns me about Charles where you are concerned? He will teach you responsibility. He will teach you restraint. Both are lessons worth learning."

"But little by little, he will also teach you to measure every discovery by how safely the world around you can tolerate it."

Magneto shook his head. "I would ask something different. What could you become if the first question was not whether Humanity was ready? What could we become?"

For the first time, the word included you.

"Charles and I have spent years fighting over the future of Mutantkind as though either of us possessed the right to define it."

A faint, almost bitter amusement crossed his face, but his eyes remained fixed upon you. "But perhaps the future has already chosen someone else."

Magneto finally raised the helmet, his grip tightened slightly around the helmet. "Stand with Charles, and he will teach you how carefully that power must be carried through the world."

Magneto's expression hardened with certainty. "Stand with me... and perhaps we discover what that power can do for Mutantkind."