Snuggles the Symbiote
It'd taken almost a week, but he'd finally gathered up enough scrap and circuits to finish a rudimentary gene tracker. With planetary range, there'd be a handful of false positives and latent mutants might not show up, but it should give him a ballpark estimate for how many Homo superior there were in this strange new Earth he'd found himself in.
A minor adjustment made easy through his vast powers and then a small charge into the crude battery and the machine activated and ran through its boot sequence and...no. That couldn't possibly be right.
According to this machine he'd constructed, there were less than a hundred mutants worldwide, mostly concentrated among the eastern half of North America. He made a few adjustments and refocused for the local area, a city that he'd been told was called Brockton Bay. Three, counting himself… Okay, one of those dots was four superimposed upon each other, but that was clearly a glitch caused by the subpar design and resources.
The man who had decided on Erik Maximoff-First name from one of his original self's aliases, surname from the twins who may or may not be his son and daughter-disassembled his machine and hid the components in the pockets of a donated trench coat and began his trek back to the homeless shelter in which he'd been forced by circumstances to reside. If he didn't make it back by the curfew, they'd give away his cot.
As he made his way to his temporary dwelling, he began to think. There are only a handful of mutants on this planet… It was probable that none of them were native. He wasn't sure what had brought them all here, but he suspected that it was a result of the battle between what appeared to a clone of one of the time-traveling Summers boys and an unknown blond man with a resemblance to the leader of the Fantastic Four.
His fellow clones contained what was, in all probability, the first generation of mutants that this world had ever seen. His instincts had been to find as many as he could, but… Now what?
He knew he was a clone. It was instinctual, he'd known it even before he'd opened his eyes after having awoken nude in a glass container with a randomized serial number on it, surrounded by similar individuals. 24005. His clone number and the number tattooed into his original self's arm at Auschwitz. He wasn't sure whether he would have preferred if it was a coincidence or a cruel joke by whoever had manufactured an army of clones.
He thought back to his, or rather, his original self's, time in the camps. To the years after. To his attempts to ensure mutant survival by making them the dominant species on the planet and his many conflicts and alliances with Charles and his X-Men and his more recent attempts to carry on Charles dream… They were all just as clear as they were before he awoke, but at the same time, they were far more distant. It legitimately felt as though they were another life, which he supposed they were in every sense of the word.
In some ways, it was a boon. His lessened emotional attachment to those memories allowed him to review his original self's actions more objectively. With hindsight and that clarity, his original self's terrorist actions in the name of mutant supremacy had probably done far more harm than good. A great deal of the hatred against mutants had probably been directed against he himself and his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants… In hindsight, that probably wasn't the best name considering his goals.
But that increased clarity did nothing to make clear what he should do now. He'd ruled out finding a way back to his original world: Without a direct way to track his universal signature, he could wander the multiverse for eternity and even if he found his way home there was already a Magneto… Unless his original self had returned to his old ways since the genetic sample used to make him was taken, but he was certain that he was adamant to stay changed this time.
His first instinct was to do what he could for mutants, but he needed to get his bearings first and less than one hundred people were barely a minority. All he could think to do was get his own needs met and then do whatever he could to put the best face forward so that this world that had never seen mutants could perhaps maybe be prevented from hating and fearing them. But how?
He was roused from his thoughts by a commotion down an alley. He looked down and saw three young men, two with shaved heads and one blonde, stomping on a man. The young men dressed in gang colors, red and black, and the blonde had a swastika tattooed on his exposed arm.
Erik's blood boiled. He reached out and seized the iron in the young men's own blood and pinned them all to a wall before approaching the man on the ground and helping him up.
"Don't help the fucking lampshade up!" The young blonde man said shortly before Erik ripped out his dental fillings and used the blood in his lips to force his mouth shut.
"Are you alright, sir?" Erik asked of the man who'd been victimized, a middle-aged man with greying red hair.
"...Yeah," the man said hoarsely, "just a couple bruises. Bastards took me by surprise is all," Erik escorted the man back to the opening of the ally.
"Do you need help?" He asked the man.
"Nah, I'm fine," the man answered. "I can get home from here and sleep it off… Dumb fuckers, I'm not even Jewish."
"It's in the experience of my family," Erik said, "that the young men who throw their lot in with the Nazis are either utterly immoral or severely mentally defective. In this case, it seems that they're both."
The man laughed. "...You, you just ripped them off the ground and threw them up against the wall… You a Hero?"
Erik thought about it. "I suppose, in a manner of speaking… You can call me-" Not Magneto. In hindsight, it was a rather villainous sounding name, but… Ah. The name he was born with. "Eisenhardt. Yiddish for Iron Heart. A perfect tweak on the nose against our morally and intellectually challenged friends, yes?"
The man laughed again. "Yeah… Well, Eisenhardt. I'll keep my eyes and ears out for you. I can make my way from here."
Erik watched the man hobble off until he turned and left his line of sight. And then Erik returned to the pinned Neo-Nazis.
Erik had learned that a group of Supervillains in this city were Neo-Nazis and led a gang of the same. Empire Eighty-Eight, they called themselves. Some of them had appropriated Norse Iconography, which made Erik wonder if any Asgardians were among his fellow clones: he imagined that Odinson would be rather cross with the scum.
He knew what to do now. He'd give the best showing for mutants by being a hero, and he'd start by taking out the trash.
"I'm going to let you down now," he said to then young men. "And I'm giving you one chance. If I see you in those colors again, if I learn that you have committed more crimes of hate… I will tear the iron from your very cells and impale your corpses upon spires of your own blood."
The horror was apparent in their eyes. He dropped them to the ground and they sprinted off.
Erik continued on his way to the shelter, though he figured that he'd have to find some other place to sleep soon, as he'd have to start working nights, so to speak.
Snuggles the Symbiote
It'd taken him only a day to relocate to a small, disused apartment near the city's docks. Apparently, the man he'd helped knew a man who knew a man who owned a rundown apartment building with plenty of vacant rooms. He got a month, off the books, but he should have at least some kind of income by the time it becomes an issue. It was quite fortuitous that he'd run into the man again.
A night later, and he was out again hunting Nazis. He'd heard that a woman had been attacked. Lacking access to the television or internet, he had to rely on second-hand sources but from asking around he'd had a decent enough idea of who the suspected perpetrator was. If he found the man, good. If not, he'd get him some other time and would probably run into some other Nazi.
Off in the distance he saw a blonde woman in white flying through the air and so he approached quickly: He didn't quite have a perfect understanding of who everyone in this city was, as of yet, but based on the tends from his own world she was probably a hero and being known as a hero to the heroes of this world could only benefit him. He didn't dare take to the air until he had proper armor, but he felt that using his magnetism to levitate for a bit and speed down a few alleys to catch up with her, dashing around to meet her at the opposite end of an alley he'd seen her dive for and-he was then punched in the face by a fleeing man.
He was momentarily knocked off balance but righted himself and seized the man by the iron in his blood and slammed him into a wall. Perhaps a little too hard, as there was a sickening crack.
He righted himself and saw the young woman examining the man he'd pinned, who was cursing. He approached.
"Thanks for the assist," the young woman said, then looked him over. Now that he was in her presence, he could tell that there was some aura about her. "Are you new?"
"You can say that," he said. "New to town. New to the business of heroism."
"Well," the girl said, "I'm Glory Girl." She offered a hand which he took and shook. "Well, this is the jackass that brutalized Andrea Young."
"How serendipitous," Erik commented, "that's who I was looking for as well." The restrained man then coughed and blood spilled from his mouth.
"Well," the young woman said, sounding a bit concerned "you messed him up pretty bad throwing him into the wall, so I'm gonna have to call my sister to fix it or we're gonna get in a lot of trouble," Glory Girl said while pulling a smartphone out from somewhere in her costume. "Hey, Ames? ...Yeah… Actually, it wasn't me this time..." she said walking off towards the end of the ally. While she made the call and the waited, Erik, ruminated on what had happened… He, or rather, the original Magneto, had far better control than that...
Five minutes later a young woman in a hooded white robe with a red cross approached and was escorted over to himself and the prisoner.
"Why is he… Oh, you're doing it?" The new girl said, "Telekinesis?"
"Ferrokinesis," Erik corrected. That and magnetokinesis, but why overcomplicate things? "I'm keeping him restrained by controlling the iron molecules in his blood cells."
He couldn't see her whole face, as she had a scarf, but he could clearly see her blink. "Hemoglobin doesn't work that way."
Erik smiled and gestured to the Neo-Nazi he had pinned. "And yet…"
"Whatever," she said, "uh Mister-"
"Eisenhardt," he supplied.
"...That's an odd name for someone who's supposedly an enemy of the Empire," the new girl commented.
"Not as much as you'd think," Erik corrected, "it's Yiddish. In fact, it was the surname of my grandfather," he half-lied, "a survivor of Auschwitz, so I can assure you that I, of anyone, have reason to oppose those who claim to carry on Adolph Hitler's allegedly great work."
The pinned prisoner muttered "fucking hebe" under his breath, which was impressive considering his condition. This time, Erik resisted the urge to cause the man further pain. For now.
"Sorry," the girl apologized. "So uh, before I get to work on this guy, would you like me to take care of that shiner that's forming?"
Erik's first instinct had been to refuse, but he did need a decent working relationship with the heroes of this world. "I would appreciate it, Miss…?"
"Panacea," the girl supplied, sounding confused.
"Sorry," he said, "I'm new in town."
"Okay, now if I have your permission?."
He nodded. "If you can be quick about it, it would be a shame if this scum were to pass on before he could repay his debt to society."
She placed a hand upon his face, near his eye. "You've got some kind of healing factor, don't you?"
"I'm sorry?"
"There's no scar tissue anywhere in your body," she explained. "You don't even have a belly button. So either you've got a healing factor that doesn't speed up your healing, because I'm not sensing you healing faster, but makes it so that you heal perfectly, or you were grown in a tube less than a month ago. And that would be ridiculous."
"Yes, it would," he said, forcing a laugh. He didn't answer the question, however, but instead just let her heal him.
"And good as new," she finished, "now you might want to get some kind of genetic screening or something, I saw a couple of mutations that I've only seen in you so I don't know if you're at risk for some kind of disease or something but I'm not messing with something… Wait… You're uh… From very, very far away, aren't you?" She sounded as though she was hinting at something.
"Panacea," the girl's sister began, "what are you getting at?"
"Eisenhardt has two things in common with that girl with the parasite I treated the other night. A gene on the twenty-third chromosome pair that I've only ever seen in her and now him, and something that most parahumans have but neither he nor she does. Which makes me think they're from the same place."
Glory Girl's eyes widened but she said nothing else.
Clearly, the girl had treated one of his fellow mutant refugees. It was quite odd that she'd have run into two of the three Homo superior in such a large city in just a few days, but then again it was mostly coincidence that he'd found the exact Nazi that he'd been looking for in the first place. He didn't comment on it.
He stood back as the two girls tended to the pinned man,mending him just enough to keep him alive and then interrogating him with threats of withholding further healing and what the effects could be on him, the healer gaining a sense of legitimacy by claiming to have sworn the Hippocratic oath even as she violated it by, essentially, psychologically torturing them man, and deflecting his threats of legal action against them or Erik himself by comparing their reputations to Nazi's and invoking their lawyer mother. It was touching, he supposed, that they were extending their protection to him after having only just met him, but at the same time… Erik would have complimented them on their ruthlessness if he hadn't been trying to present himself in a heroic light.
Eventually, the man spoke, telling them of the so-called Empire's attempts to expand into the Docks and the potential for war on the horizon now that someone named Lung had been taken into custody and that the ABB, another gang in town, was weak.
Erik didn't care, because if he had his way this Empire wouldn't last long enough to claim that territory.
As the girls finished their interrogation, he himself stepped forward.
"Sir," Erik said, "to remind you, I have complete control of every atom of iron in your body. I could easily tear you to shreds with a thought. Keep that in mind, because I'm only going to ask you once: Where can I find this so-called 'Kaiser?' If you don't know, you can instead tell me where I can find someone who does."
And then he looked the man in his eyes. The Nazi buckled under the pressure of his gaze, and he left the man in the care of the locals.
Snuggles the Symbiote
As luck would have it, this Kaiser was meeting with one of his lieutenants, a man called Hookwolf, that very night. Apparently, in addition to espousing white supremacism and anti-semitism, the so-called Empire made money by selling illegal narcotics and gambling on blood sports, and this Hookwolf arranged dogfights. One was scheduled for later this week, and Hookwolf was reporting in to the alleged Emperor on the final arrangements. He wasn't sure why someone who claimed to lead an empire went to his minion's location rather than make the lieutenant come to him, but he supposed that this Kaiser had his reasons.
They were located in a warehouse of some sort. There were no obvious guards outside the building, but he still moved with haste to enter, using an electromagnetic field to disable an electrical lock on a side door before sneaking in.
The building wasn't lit properly and there'd clearly been renovations done, installing a ring and seating for the fights. From where he was he could make out an office or at least a room closed off from the rest of the warehouse. There were two people standing outside the door, a figure in metallic armor with a cage around their head, holding two kama, and a shirtless man in a metal tiger mask.
He didn't think they'd seen him in his hiding spot and-they both turned to look right where he was, the tiger-masked one pointing a fist in his direction.
So he used a magnetic field to send them both crashing into the wall behind them. There was nothing for it, even as he alerted the men inside the office to the presence of an intruder.
Two men emerged, one in bladed steel armor and one in a hastily thrown on metal wolf mask but otherwise shirtless.
Erik shed his trenchcoat, thinking it would get in the way of a full-fledged fight, and left his hiding place near the point of entry, revealing himself to his adversaries.
The wolf-masked man, who he presumed to be Hookwolf, literally growled at him. He was reminded vaguely of Sabertooth. "I don't know who the fuck you are, but you've got a lot of nerve..."
Erik blinked. "There's a lot of iron in your body."
"What?"
Many, many tiny hooks and blades of steel existed within this man, lining his muscles. Erik smiled and seized each. Then he twisted.
The man, Hookwolf, screamed. A loud and primal cry of abject agony.
The two he'd thrown into the wall roused themselves and leaped at him. He raised a hand, freezing them in mid-air with an electromagnetic field. With a flick of his arm, he hurled them over himself, through the air, and into the far wall.
The one he presumed was Hookwolf shifted into a mass of hooks and blades. It was rather amorphous, but he assumed that the man could shift into various shapes from this state… If only he wasn't trapped in Erik's control.
Erik could see a spike of metal sliding from the ground beside him from the corner of his eye, and so levitated from the ground held aloft by his perfect control of electromagnetic fields.
The armored one, who he assumed to be Kaiser, swore under breath and more blades and spikes erupted from the ground and the walls and the ceiling, each trying to impale him, but Erik was able to avoid each one until he was backed up into a corner.
Then he dropped the screaming mass of blades and seized the blades and spikes that the Nazi tried to impale him on with his full power. Lightning flowed freely from his hands and static made every hair on his body stand on end as the high-quality steel began to warp, to bend, to break.
And then, with a strong pulse that made the warehouse's lights flicker, he made each and every blade and spike shatter into little shards. Erik made each shard freeze in place and then dance around him, sorting each fragment of steel for the best quality pieces: Erik was proud, but not so proud as to not accept such generous gift when given so freely.
The steel properly sorted, he settled the discarded fragments into neat piles on the ground and used powerful magnetic fields to reshape, restructure, merge and separate, and finally form upon his body armor and a helm, resembling his original self's own equipment but clean, gleaming silver rather than dark red. All he needed now was a billowing cape.
He slowly lowered himself to the ground, touching down gently, before the so-called Kaiser, who hadn't moved a muscle since Eisenhardt had shattered his summoned weapons.
"Who are you?" the bladed armored man asked. "What do you want?"
"Eisenhardt, Master of Magnetism." He'd have to workshop that, as the alliterative title wasn't as effective with his new name.
"Hard as Iron?" Kaiser questioned. "It's certainly a fitting name… Is this an audition? I do have to say that you've made an impressive showing but there are better ways to get my attention."
"Actually, it's Heart of Iron," he corrected. "Yiddish, not German. And, well, knowing that I'm sure that even someone stupid enough to believe that pale skin and defective hair and eye pigmentation genes make you inherently superior to other humans can figure that there's really only one reason why I'd be seeking out a Nazi." Their positions had been reversed while he was in the air, the Kaiser's back was at the door that he'd come in through.
A sudden wall of steel blades was erected between himself and Kaiser, and when Eisenhardt had torn it down the Kaiser had fled.
"That… Son of a bitch." Ah, it'd seemed that Hookwolf had reverted to his form of flesh at some point. Eisenhardt proceeded to throw him into the wall with the other two.
The Kaiser's escape had been… Problematic. Never before had Magneto's powers, either Erik's or his original self's, been limited to line of sight. And the wall had taken far longer to tear down than it should have… He felt more tired now that he should have, as well... Between that and his moment of imprecision the other night, Erik was forced to conclude that, for whatever reason, his powers had been lessened from those of his original self. Not by much, but enough to allow for accidents or for him to more easily strain himself.
He then checked on three that he'd thrown into the wall, noting that they were out cold but breathing. He carefully positioned them and then, after taking a moment of rest and great care to avoid accidents, merged the remaining shards of metal into a long, sturdy pole that he wrapped around them. Blinking away his sudden tiredness, he hummed to himself, not quite sure what to do next…
...Perhaps he should take a page from the terrible comedian who was an ally of the X-Men? He searched the office, finding a sheet of paper and a pen that looked as though it hadn't been touched in a while. A quick check to make sure it worked, and soon a note saying "To the Heroes of this city, a gift from Eisenhardt" was attached to a trio of unconscious and bound Neo-Nazis.
He had a little change in his trenchcoat, which he collected as he left. This town was riddled with Payphones, he'd make an anonymous call to the organization that policed Superhumans and then continue his crusade on another night.