| Erik Magnus Lensherr II | |
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| Portrayed By | Neil Jackson |
|---|---|
| Gender | Male |
| Date of Birth | February 04 |
| Age | 24 |
| Zodiac Sign | Aquarius |
| Aliases | Leif Anderson |
| Place of Birth | New York, New York |
| Current Location | Westchester, New York |
| Occupation | Teacher |
| Known Relatives | None |
| Significant Other | None |
| Identity | Known to certain people |
| Known Abilities | None |
| First Appearance | ??? |
"You only made one mistake. You brought all your tin men to play with the House of Magnus."
As one might imagine from his name, Erik Magnus Lensherr the second has a very interesting history, and a lot of baggage associated with him and it. Known almost universally as Leif Anderson, he teaches Government and Politics at the Xavier Institute.
History
So you know those women who will try to get pregnant just so a man will stay with one of them. Yeah, real messed up, huh? Meet my mother, Rivka, aged 25. She was a mutant, a highly sensitive empath, which is great except when coupled with a pre-disposition toward mental instability. All of those emotions hitting you at once, especially in a city like New York, can be difficult for even a strong mind, and sad to say my mother’s mind was not strong. By the time she was 25 and joined the Brotherhood she was already somewhat unhinged, and just hiding it well.
Hiding it well enough to attract the attention of the leader of the Brotherhood, as a matter of fact; you might have heard of him, his name is Magneto. They had similar stories, although my mother was a lot younger than him; they were both Jewish, both had people from their family lost in the camp, and both struggling with pulling the genetic lottery and being members of the /2/ most persecuted genepools in the world. I don’t know whether or not he loved her, but she loved him. A little bit too much, actually; from what I understand she came to see him as the Messiah, come to deliver their people. An addictive personality and a charismatic leader will always be a recipe for disaster. With visions of him being her husband, and her being his Queen, she stopped taking birth control and got pregnant. But before he knew, he left to go continue his radical agenda and left my mother alone.
I want to point out here again I was conceived as the child of an addictive, unhinged personality who wanted to bear the Messiah’s child so he would stay with her. This is not conducive to a normal childhood, and for about the first six years it wasn’t. My mother would go from place to place, finding a job and giving us new identities until she became convinced ‘they’ were coming for her, to take me and use me against Magneto. Amidst this at age five I began to display my father’s magnetic abilities, which made us move even more. By the age of 8 I had been in 23 different schools in 22 different states. So on the plus side I’ve seen a lot of America.
At age 8 a social worker finally caught up with my mother and took me away from her, and she ended up in a Mental institution. On a normal human this might have been a wonderful idea, but for an already unhinged empathy with a Sarah Connor bent, all of those emotions only drove her irrecoverably over the edge. The last time I saw her was in 2000, and she was…gone. There was a body standing there, but nothing remained of my mother.
Living in foster care worked fine for about two years until I started accidentally interfering with television reception, and accidentally sent the foster family’s vault to a different zip code. That doesn’t tend to go over so well with the mundanes, especially since I’m pretty sure he had corporate documents in there. He shouldn’t have lived so close to the river is all I’m saying. After that I bounced from foster home to foster home, including a couple of memorable stays in group homes.
Children services meant well, I guess, but those puberty years are difficult for mutants and most foster families don’t want to put up with a mutant. So like I’d seen a lot of America before, I ended up seeing a lot of New York as I went from place to place. I ended up back in New York City public schools by 13.
13 was the year my life changed, the year I was approached by two different groups—simultaneously. I’ll say this for White Queen and Xavier, their sense of timing was always fantastic. I’m sitting in homeroom at whatever school that was when I get called to the Principle’s office. I figure they found out my ‘parents’ signatures were all forged and I’m about to have another run in with a group home, when I come in and see a bald man in a wheel chair waiting to talk to me. The conversation went pretty well as I already knew who and what I was; my mother had left me two letters, one written in a moment of lucidity explaining my parentage, the other a rambling glimpse in to a maddened mind telling me how I was the son of the Messiah destined to blah blah blah.
So there I am ready to sign up for the Institute when in walks this tall, gorgeous blonde. I loved Professor Xavier like a father and will always be grateful to him for the things he did for me, but Emma Frost makes a hell of a stronger sales pitch to a 13 year old boy than he does. So by this time I’m a jaded vet of the mean streets and I think I’m a pretty slick operator, so I figure I’ll spin a good story about my past and see which one will give me more. The first lesson I was ever taught about mutants came quickly: It takes a lot more than a slick operator to spin a story against a scan-happy telepath, and Emma was a lot less guarded about scanning people than she would be later. So all of a sudden there is a fight brewing in the Principal’s office, and all of my survival instincts are kicking in big time. So I jump out the window. The second story window.
Thank /God/ I inherited flight too. That was my first brush with the atmosphere and sweet, glorious flight. Of course like all fledglings leaving the nest I wasn’t really great at it and soon learned about sweet, glorious crash landings in central park complete with sweet, glorious compound fracture broken limbs (arm and leg, to be precise). I black out because I’m /not/ Wolverine, and wake up at the Institute.
Turns out they won the fight, but I still have a choice. They will heal me up and let me go to the Massachusetts Institute if I prefer, or I can stay at the Mansion. They let me recuperate, and I talk to the staff and some of the students; Professor X fortunately declared a moratorium on telling people I’m Mutant bin Laden’s son. Iceman, Cyclops, Jean Grey, I meet and talk to all of them, still undecided. Did I mention what an impression a super model with gravity defying orbs of justice makes on a boy?
And then she walked in to say hi. Through a wall. And introduced herself as Kitty. We started talking and the only reason she left is because she ended up being ten minutes late for her class, after having talked with me the whole lunch period. She smiled at me, and I forgot all about White Queen and her stacks of power. It was kindness, a bed and a couple of casts that got me in to the Mansion but in every real way it was Kitty who made me an X-man.
The Mansion and the team offered me a place and family and a way to be a part of a group, all of those basic human needs that you can forget about until you have them again and it feels so good. I settled on a ‘name’, Leif Anderson (Anderson meaning son of man, and Leif after Leif Eriksson. Get it?), and settled in to a role. No one save those X-Men who came with Xavier (Cyclops, Jean Grey, Wolverine) knew who I was, and I found trust and companionship. Except from Wolverine, blessedly paranoid Wolverine, who was convinced I was going to turn out like Magneto. Of course that might have been because I was spending more and more time with Kitty.
I became, along with Kitty, an X-Man at about 14 and immediately suffered the same debilitating condition that effects all new superheroes. I couldn’t come up with a bloody codename. Magneto Jr was right out, as was Magnet Lad. I tried Magnetix for a while but the grammarian in me rebelled, and so for the first four missions I went by four different codenames, much to everyone’s amusement. Finally for the fifth mission I went on with the X-Men I settled on a codename, the one that I would have forever I thought: Polaris.
I settled in to a blaster/support role on the team. I was never going to be a front line fighter or even much of a physical anything. Last picked on the softball team because the best you can do is try to catch the ball with your face does not translate in to a very competent martial artist, and I am confident enough in my masculinity to say that the only times I ever got to handcuff Kitty was when she let me. Because otherwise she would kick my butt.
Of course when at age 16 I realized I could give a bad guy a /stroke/ I figured I was doing ok in the combat department, even if it was…a really dirty messy trick. Hooray for iron in the bloodstream. As I continued as an X-man I gained more and more fine control over my powers, experimenting with the various applications that I had heard my father use, although I never tried to stop Earth’s molten core for various legal and practical reasons. Over our years Kitty and I grew very close; at fourteen we started dating, which was made interesting by a brief possession of a ninja ghost. Yeah.
Also over these years I developed a passion for the law and politics. I watched as time and time again Professor Xavier and Doctor Grey and others would go and testify before Congress about mutant rights issues, speak in defense of our people and have it do nothing. If mutants were being persecuted under a set of laws then I wanted to know those laws so I could fight back. After I graduated from High School via the Institute I was accepted into NYU for a double major in pre-Law and Public Policy. That was a great time.
Within one month three great things happened. Kitty and I both got accepted into NYU, she to get her bachelor’s in Computer Science from a great program, which meant that we could do the second: We got engaged, and got an apartment in the city. Not that we had anything against the mansion but when you are dating someone who’s adopted ‘big brother’ has super hearing and smelling and you live in a house with the three strongest psychics in the world, trying to have sex can be a somewhat risky and embarrassing proposition. And finally we went on one bang up mission with Emma.
Emma had joined us in the interim, leaving behind the MA and the Hellfire Club to become our White Queen. The day Kitty and I got our High School diplomas she gave each of us a little trophy with a placard that read ‘Massachusetts Academy Survivor’ as a joke…and then told us she had found the new headquarters of the Hellfire Club…and when the Court would be there.
We had, the three of us, been hunting them for years since they continued to interfere in our lives. When we were 15 Shinobi Shaw kidnapped Kitty because he had fallen in love with her. When we were 17 they put Emma in a coma and tried to take over her brain with some Shi’ar device. And so at 18 when Shaw turned traitor and fed us information, we leapt into action. We set a trap, we caught them in it and then the three of us threw the Hellfire Club headquarters brick by brick in to the river, and watched as the Court all got life sentences. Or so we thought.
9/11 changed a lot of things. I was 17 when it happened, and Emma was in her Hellfire Club Coma. It…its hard to describe the reaction of a mutant to something like that. Had I been there, or Jean been there, we could have stopped those planes. A skin of metal is nothing to me and something like that would have been child’s play for a telekinetic like Jean (assuming she had been around at the time, given all the Phoenix stuff. I really hate space aliens). Cyclops could have blasted them from the sky, Storm could have made them miss in to the ocean…and yet we could do nothing but watch as it happened. We knew nothing of its coming and by the time we reacted it was too late to do anything except help look for survivors. And yet some good came out of the attack.
Faced with a grim reminder that man is as vicious to man as any other threat, a lot of the anti-mutant hostility began to dissipate. The renewed legislation to register us was taken off of the floor in the face of our efforts in New York. And more importantly the attack changed everything for the one mutant who had tried things like that before.
To see yourself through someone else’s eyes can be a life changing experience if you are of the mind to take those insights and do something with it. Before he even realized it Magneto was coming together with other mutants and the country to help at Ground Zero. He felt the sense of community that responded in the wake of such an atrocity, and he saw the way the world viewed Osama bin Laden…and realized for the first time that it was how they saw him, too. And that effected him.
I spent a week working in Ground Zero with Magneto, for the first time meeting my father face to face rather than in battle, on a mission or when he was in hiding. He had pretty much known who I was before, but now we both spoke and came clean; we talked 17 years of talks as we lifted the skeletons of buildings out of the way. Magneto saved over 100 lives by responding so quickly, and all in all the Mutants of New York saved more than that. Magneto turned himself in, was convicted and, at the behest of the 100 survivors…was pardoned by the President himself. He renounced violence, disbanded the Brotherhood, and moved to Genosha. Genosha was a minor island that was half mutant and half human, with the two living physically separated by a DMZ similar to Korea after a conflict in the mid 1980s.
Working as a man of peace, by 2003 Magneto had managed to bring both halves (North and South) Genosha together in one government for the first time since the initial split. Within the year he was chosen as King of Genosha by an 80 percent majority of both halves, and the world held its’ breath as a once tyrant ruled a now peaceful country. The X-Men were on high alert this whole time, waiting to see if this would turn out to be another one of Magneto’s schemes. And every night I prayed that it was not. Finally, months passed and Genosha remained stable and prosperous. Magneto did have a bomb to drop, but one that earned him accolades throughout the world: A right of return, a birthright policy similar to the one adopted by Israel. Any mutant in the world had the right to be a citizen of Genosha without renouncing their former citizenship, and be as if they had been born a Genoshan. Within six months he followed this proclamation up with two more: Open citizenship for anyone, mutant or not, and the formation of the Genoshan Congress.
Magneto /divested/ himself of a number of powers, founding a House and a Senate and a Judicial branch to boot. He retained control of the government but added balances in the legislative, and three months later Colossus (who had left to join him early on) was elected Prime Minister of Genosha. It was a proud day for the world, I think. The first Mutant head of state and the first openly homosexual head of state all in one.
During Magneto’s rebuilding of Genosha I focused on my studies of the law and my life with Kitty. I was content to let my father run a country half the world away to earn my two Bachelor’s degrees. I was accepted into Columbia University to pursue a J.S.D. (Doctor of the Science of Law) Degree, and Kitty began working on a double Doctorate in Computer Science and Mathematics. Did I mention that in addition to being able to kick my butt she was smarter than me?
Again this was a really happy time for me. I was not valedictorian of my undergraduate class, as that title went to Kitty, but I was living in New York earning the degree I wanted and living with the woman I loved. I was an X-Man and helping to train and teach the next generation of mutants at the Institute. And while compared to my super genius friends (Dr. McCoy had a Doctorate by 20, Kitty was working on two and was done at 23 and Emma Frost was a financial wiz) I was a total slacker in the real world getting a Master of Law degree by 23 is quite the accomplishment.
I had never been close to Wanda or Pietro, my two half-siblings, as they tended to be on the other side from the X-Men. I had met them, and we all knew after a while what and who we were; but Wanda was too unstable and reminded me too much of my mother, while Pietro…was just a dick. During Magneto’s rise in Genosha I assumed they were helping him, but I had no desire to connect with either of them until they were on my doorstep one night while Kitty and I were having dinner. They were there as the Crown Prince and Princess of Genosha to extend an invitation to their brother and his fiancé to come to Genosha…and help our father.
It was not an easy decision, and if I could go back in time and change it I would do it in a heartbeat. Kitty and I talked for hours, for days, while Wanda and Pietro visited the city as part of a ‘Royal Tour’, announced as Their Highnesses. Magneto’s offer was open and generous: Be a part of the Royal Family, help make the world a better place for mutants, and have a state wedding for Kitty and I. Two broke Jewish grad students in New York all of a sudden having the opportunity to change the world for their kind (Mutants, not Jews) is a big thing to process. And in the end we chose to take the opportunity before us.
We flew out to Genosha a week later, and for the second time in my life I talked to Magneto at length. He gave his blessing to our marriage, and we began touring the country. I saw the amazing things that Magneto, now Magnus I, had done in Genosha over seven years. I saw a country where he accomplished what Professor Xavier had dreamed of existed: Mutants and their neighbors working side by side. A country that was growing almost exponentially as people from all over the world came to live in what was already being termed a Paradise. And once again I found myself with a new family; I had siblings, I had a father, and I had a woman I was going to get to make a Princess in front of the whole world when I married her. It was perfect.
If you’ve ever been to a bachelor party you’ll know what they are like; now just imagine that with mutants. Pietro decided he was going to try to keep up with Wolverine for drinking, knowing full well that Wolverine doesn’t actually get drunk. I sat with Cyclops and Havoc smoking cigars and drinking, laughing as Quicksilver passed out. X-Men, Brotherhood and all came together in Genosha and laughed as one as we partied, and I heard that Kitty’s bachelorette party involved much of the same. Somehow Magneto had done it, he had made the Garden of Eden, a paradise; and I was going to be right in the thick of it.
It all ended two days later, the day of my wedding to Kitty. Someone, and we never found out who, decided that Magneto still needed to be punished. A bullet won’t kill the Master of Magnetism, not a normal one. But if you take that ceramic coating they put on space shuttles and fire it out of a projectile he can stop the casing, but not the bullet. Outside of the first Synagogue in Genosha we stood, and in one horrifying moment we found out how fragile the peace was, how fragile the alliances we had built were. In one horrible moment a space shuttle bullet found Magneto’s neck and killed him, and we had Civil War.
Within two days there was already unrest in the streets between factions fighting for Wanda and Pietro, as they gathered armies to try to fight for their claim to the throne. All of the democracy was thrown out the window as grief stricken mobs aligned themselves to one of the three of us, begging for protection and demanding vengeance for Magnus the Great (a name I even managed to chuckle about, given Magnus means ‘The great’ already). Wanda ended up with the Brotherhood and the largest block of mutants, Pietro hired himself about 10,000 mercenaries with the money he looted from the Treasury and I ended up with the backing of my dear friends, the X-Men.
I never wanted to fight, but I saw that Wanda and Pietro were both unhinged by my father’s death. Wanda had never been stable, but…for her this was the closest she had gotten to family, and it had been ripped away. She reacted as my mother had when faced with tragedy, and she lost it. For about a month there was a three-way stalemate as we begged, begged for peace. I tried to negotiate with Pietro and only escaped because bullets weren’t much of a threat to me; I tried to negotiate with Wanda, and her response was to unmake the building we were in from existence and try to take me with it. And I sent pleas to the U.N. and the U.S. asking for help.
Remember how I said we only thought we took out the Hellfire Club? Turns out we caught their patsies, not the true Inner Circle. And the true Inner Circle is what manipulated the U.N. and U.S. against us. We would receive no help, except for a ‘helpful’ blockade that shot down anyone trying to escape. Now we were stuck on a war-torn island, fighting for our lives. For three months we fought a losing war as Wanda gained more and more power. After all, we were fighting for peace, and she unmade people who didn’t fight for her; once again the X-Men did not have the best business pitch in the market.
Wanda bought out the mercenaries from Pietro and captured him. He ‘voluntarily abdicated’ his right to the throne and was ‘relocated for his safety’ to a prison camp. That’s when Wanda got bold and began sending Sentinels, purchased from the Club, after us. I watched men and women I’d known for a decade die at the hands of her forces. Cyclops, Iceman, even Professor Xavier died in the battles. Finally all that was left were myself, Shadowcat, Wolverine and Doctor McCoy.
Over the years we had met with people from alternate realities, and Doctor McCoy had devised a way to send Kitty and I through to another one to be safe, to get away. We prepared, each filling a duffel bag with three sets of clothes, three thousand dollars (US) and a gun. All of us were going to go through the portal, and the last X-Men of our reality would live, and find a way to return. But we were attacked as it was powering up by the brunt of Wanda’s forces. Doctor McCoy was killed as he opened the portal…and seconds later Kitty phased out of the way of one bullet, and back in to the way of another.
With a battle raging around us as the last of our allies died, I held the woman I had loved since I was thirteen in my arms. I pulled the bullet out but it was too late…she was leaving me. I looked in to her beautiful face as she put a hand against my cheek and whispered very softly to me “Live.” But I had no desire to live, not after she died in my arms. I never liked killing, but I killed them in waves that day. Have you ever seen a man having all of the iron pulled out of his body through his pores? How about a thousand, all at once, ripped apart by the grief of a man who has lost everything?
I didn’t care if I died, I didn’t care if they tore me to pieces; all I wanted was Kitty back, and barring that to kill every single one of them that I could before they took me. But Wolverine thought otherwise. Wolverine, who had never liked me and always distrusted me, who never thought I was good enough for Kitty but put up with me because she loved me, knew that she wanted me to live. And so as he was shot, burned and electrocuted…he threw me and the bag through the mirror in to another world. And closed it.
New York. I am now back in New York and I have nothing to my name almost. Three sets of clothing, three thousand dollars (with duplicated serial numbers) and a Beretta. And my pictures of Kitty, to keep me from eating my gun. I’ve gone from the streets to a Mansion to a Palace, and now I’m back on the streets again. And the only reason I’ve gone this far is because I know she wanted me to live, and that the sacrifice of my friends was for that one cause.
And so I’ve come to the one place I could think of, in a world where I apparently never existed; to the Mansion, the home of the X-Men and all of those people I knew…but don’t, not in this world. If they don’t have a place for me…then I really do have nothing left.
Timeline
Since he was approved Erik has managed to get somewhat settled in to life in Westchester, teaching at the school and getting adjusted to this reality. He has made friends, fought with them, and of course done things he regrets. But that is life.
Powers
Erik inherited the full gamut of his father's powers, with the potential to have them at their original strength. In his universe the were at his father's strength, and so he had the complete package: Control over pretty much any metal and the electromagnetic spectrum with extreme precision, flight, and a decent amount of body control through manipulating iron in the system. While he also inherited his father's flair for the dramatic, that doesn't exactly count as a power.
In this Universe he has run in to a problem, however. When he tries to use his higher level powers he will frequently get headaches; the more complicated or 'power' intensive the ability, the larger the headache, to the point of being cripplingly painful. This is obviously not something he spreads around, keeping it quiet instead. He has also found that preemptively dosing himself with pain killers, vicodin or morphine and the like, can mitigate or at least delay the effects and allow him to function close to his full power. Of course this has other side effects in the long run.
Skills
- Law. Before he switched universes Erik was recognized as quite the brilliant legal mind. He had finished his dissertation and was literally days from submitting it to get his Doctor of the Science of Law (J.S.D.) from Columbia. J.S.D. being the terminal, very difficult and rarely bothered with law degree. He does have his Masters of Laws…of course the proof of that is in another universe.
- Other Schooling: Erik has a double Bachelors in Law and Politics, as well as having taken as many college Physics classes as he could get his hands on without being a Physics major.
- Intelligence: Erik is incredibly bright. Not Shadowcat or Hank McCoy level genius, but on his own he is quite brilliant and capable of mental feats.
- Basic martial arts. Erik largely stopped training for fighting, although he is still very fit, when he realized he could give people strokes with his powers. He has started to change this, advancing from roughly yellow belt to green belt in the time he has been in this Universe. (For our purposes it goes White Yellow Green Blue Purple1 Purple2 Brown1 Brown2 Brown3 Black1 - Black 10. The way it does in Shotokan karate).
- Physical abilities: Erik keeps himself in really good shape…to make up for the fact that he can be the definition of a klutz. He is working at it, getting better. He has found out just how much he neglected his martial arts and physical dexterity to focus on just general health and decent muscle mass, and is working hard to get back lost time with this.
Current Projects:
- Martial Arts
- Physical competency
- Get an Identity set up here
Logs
Quotes
- "My names is Erik Magnus Lensherr the second, and I'm from the universe that was my home, so I don't have a name for it. And in that Universe, before everything went to shit, I was engaged to marry my Universe's Katherine Anne Pryde." Erik says. "Its why I've been somewhat avoiding you, Miss Pryde."
- "One man's heart breaking tragedy is another's weekend project." Erik, OOCly.
- "I'm a lawyer, and I don't want to be seen as inducing children to commit an illegal act. Also, at the end of the day I like to say: At least I'm not as bad an influence on the kids as Logan." Erik comments dryly.
Trivia
- He can manipulate magnetism. Yeah, its' genetic.
Gallery
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