Magneto

While far from a household name just yet, Magneto is known as a "mutant terrorist" who preaches a militant dogma for his fellow mutants. He is occasionally brought up by politicians and pundits when they need a "mutant boogeyman" to show off as proof of how "dangerous" mutantkind is. However, Magneto's full power levels, identity, and history remain shrouded in mystery, and he has a significant following in the nascent mutant community.

Background
The boy who would one day become the mutant demagogue known as Magneto was born under the name Max Eisenhardt in Germany during the late 1920's. Needless to say, it was not an easy time to be a Jewish boy growing up in Germany, especially for a bright and athletic boy like Max...drawing attention to yourself was not a good thing for a Jew to do at the time. When the Nazis passed the Nuremberg Laws, Max and his family narrowly escaped being rounded up, and fled to Warsaw, Poland, where they believed they would be safe from Nazi oppression. Sadly, after the Nazis invaded Poland, his family was caught while trying to escape from the Warsaw Ghetto, and the German Army fired upon them with machine guns. Unbeknownst to Max, his mutant power manifested in that moment, deflecting the bullets away from himself, but he was unable to save his mother, father and uncle. To make matters more unfortunate, Max's survival was only the beginning of his suffering, as he was sent to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp.

Heeding the advice that elders had given him to "do whatever it takes to survive" Max became one of the Sonderkommando...the Jewish prisoners who were tasked with assisting in the operation of the Gas Chambers. It was ghastly, soul-draining work, leading fellow Jews to the gas chambers, stripping them of valuables, and even moving the bodies to the crematoriums. Max survived longer than any other Sonderkommando, largely because he showed a strong knack for keeping the ovens working. Max himself fell into despair, and was on the verge of suicide when he spied a new arrival to the camps...a Gypsy girl by the name of Magda. He managed to bribe one of the guards with valuables he'd retrieved from the dead to prevent Magda from being exterminated. Keeping her carefully hidden, Max began formulating a plan to escape.

As the war dragged on, the guards at the camp grew both desperate and sloppy. They stepped up the amount of prisoners being killed but grew more lax in how attentive they were to their duties. Some guards even fled, not wanting to be caught by the Allies and convicted of War Crimes. Some of the prisoners got the idea to stage a revolt, and when it was unleashed, Max made his move, taking Magda and fleeing the camp altogether. By sheer luck and ingenuity...they succeeded (perhaps because there were too few guards to mount an effective search). Ironically, it would only be a few weeks later that Auschwitz would be liberated by the Allies. Max and Magda knew nothing of this, however, and fled into the mountains of Eastern Europe, living in relative isolation for a few years...regaining their strength and health and trying to help each other cope with the horrors they had witnessed. They were married not long after their escape. To avoid detection however, Max began using the name "Magnus" and passed himself off as a Sinte Gypsy like Magda. By the time the war had concluded, Max had no family, immediate or distant, left alive. He was utterly devoted to Magda, and they soon had an infant daughter they named Anya. Magnus decided they should move to the city to find a better means of providing for their new family. Magda disagreed with the idea, but Magnus was able to talk her into it. They were both barely out of their teen years when they came to the Soviet city of Vinnitsa, and to a less-than-warm welcome.

Magnus did manage to find work within the city, but soon ran afoul of one of his supervisors, who continually tried to cheat him out of his full earnings. Eventually, Magnus had been pushed far enough, and consciously manifested his mutant powers for the first time, hurling a crowbar towards the supervisor. Stunned by his new found abilities, Magnus fled towards the inn where Magda and Anya were staying, only to find it on fire. Magnus attempted to use his abilities to save Anya, but some who had witnessed his attack on his supervisor had summoned members of the KGB, who brutally beat Magnus, rendering him unable to help Anya, who fell from the second story of the inn, already burning and died before her father's eyes. In his rage and grief, Magnus unleashed a powerful blast of infrared radiation that every person in the surrounding several blocks save for Magda. Magda was horrified by Magnus' abilities, and cursed him as a monster while fleeing from him in terror, despite his earnest pleas to help bury their daughter. Magnus of course fled Vinnitsa almost immediately afterwards, and began to search in vain for Magda. Along the way, he utilized the services of a master forger to craft a new identity for himself: That of Erik Lensherr, Sinte Gypsy. The identity was put in place to help him avoid the KGB, and make the search for Magda easier. Sadly, he never found her, and never knew that when she fled, she was pregnant with twins. After a few years of vain searching for Magda (who died shortly after giving birth to twin children, Wanda and Pietro), Erik made his way to the nation of Israel, where he found work assisting other survivors of the Holocaust who were more psychologically damaged than he was. He also began educating himself in the use of his mutant powers, as well as many other subjects. He soon found he not only had vast potential, but also that he had an equally vast capacity for learning. Still, he remained unaware of what exactly he was, and how his abilities came to be...until he met Charles Xavier. Charles was another aid worker who was already gaining renown for his success in treating the most "damaged" patients. He and Erik struck up a fast friendship, finding in each other an intellectual equal. Eventually, they also revealed to each other their mutant powers. Charles was the first to tell Erik of what exactly he was...a mutant, and one of the most powerful on the planet, much like Charles himself. The pair spent many months debating and philosophizing about the nature of their existence and quite simply what it all meant. Charles was the eternal optimist, dreaming of a day when these mutants would be accepted by humanity and live with them in peaceful coexistence, but even in those days Erik's own beliefs were far more cynical...he believed that the mutants would have to protect themselves from humanity, who would only fear them.

After many months of camaraderie, Charles and Erik eventually parted ways for a time. Both turning to wandering the world, albeit for different purposes. Charles was wandering to further the pursuit of his dream. Erik had not yet fully formed his own path, and instead began working as a hunter of Nazi war criminals. He proved quite adept at the role, capturing many and turning them over to Israel to be judged. Along the way, however, he also found many troves of hidden Nazi gold...gold that had been plundered from the victims of the Nazis. Gold he took for himself, vowing that the sacrifice of those that it had been stolen from in the first place would not be in vain, but rather that this might one day help preserve a different people from the same fate. He continued his education and training himself in the use of his powers, as well. So it continued for several years until Erik received a message from his old friend Charles, asking him to join him at his estate in Westchester, New York.

Erik joined Charles Xavier at his estate, where Charles outlined his ideas for a special school to teach young mutants how to safely harness their abilities. Mutants that would then use those abilities to help mankind and foster peace and understanding between man and mutant. Erik remained skeptical that such a thing would ever occur, but out of friendship, and perhaps out of the last embers of hope remaining in him, Erik helped Charles design the early stages of what would become his School for Gifted Youngsters, and more so he was instrumental in the design and initial building of Xavier's mutant-detecting machine, Cerebro. During this time he also came into the acquaintance of one Amelia Voght, who was Xavier's lover at the time, and had a dalliance with a woman who would later give birth to one Lorna Dane. Unfortunately, as time passed, Erik grew more and more cynical about Charles' chances for success. As more mutants began to emerge and humanity began reacting to them in exactly the way he expected, Erik began to feel that something more drastic would need to be done to protect the mutant species. He parted ways with Xavier once more, wishing him well, but unable to find enough faith in Charles' vision to sustain him.

Still, Erik was not yet sure how best to go about protecting mutantkind. He fell back into old habits, hunting Nazi war criminals yet again, this time in conjunction with the CIA, under the code-name "Magneto." He also met and fell in love with a human woman named Isabelle. Unfortunately, his CIA "handler" eventually turned on him, and murdered Isabelle. Enraged, Magneto rejected humanity entirely, and after erasing the records of his work with the CIA, he fled once more, and began to formulate a plan for a mutant "army" of his own. He built hidden safe houses in various corners of the world, and after building mutant-detection devices of his own, he began looking for recruits. Among the first he encountered was the shapeshifter known as Mystique. Impressed with her resourcefulness and experience, he offered her the position of his second. The offer accepted, they set to finding others to bring to their cause. Erik reached out to Amelia Voght, who had grown estranged from Xavier and embittered towards humanity, accepting her as a "voice of reason" that could sometimes temper Magneto and Mystique's more violent and militant sides...sometimes. Magneto also rescued a pair of mutant twins from an angry mob, and was soon shocked to discover that this "Wanda and Pietro Maximoff" were in fact his long-lost children...children he didn't even know he had. As others were brought into the fold, Magneto dubbed his organization the "Brotherhood of Mutants" and soon developed a reputation within the "underground" mutant community as a potential leader, and a voice in favor of mutant superiority. This philosophy struck a chord with many embittered and angry young mutants, and before long the ranks of the Brotherhood began to swell.

It would only be a short time until the Brotherhood started conducting "terrorist" raids, usually to secure resources vital to the "cause" and usually not so public and flashy as to attract a huge amount of attention...but certainly enough to put the Brotherhood "on the radar" of the governments of the world. They also began to come into conflict with Xavier's own group of mutants, the X-Men, who often managed to prevent the Brotherhood from succeeding in their tasks. Still, the Brotherhood continued to grow, and Magneto continued to plot, dreaming of the day when mutants would take their rightful place as "inheritors of the Earth."

Personality

 * Aloof: Magneto carries himself as a stoic and emotionally distant figure. Not terribly surprising when one considers the tragedies and traumas he's endured. He has a difficult time forming emotional attachments, and so he tends to maintain a cool demeanor to ward off any attempts by others to achieve them. Couple that with a powerful ego and a sense of superiority, and while Magneto does indeed tend to come across as something of an "ennobled" figure, he can also come across as quite the pompous jerk.
 * Unstable: Magneto's sanity is not altogether reliable, thanks to the combination of his many tragedies and an unfortunate side effect of his mutant abilities. He can have powerful (and dangerous) mood swings seemingly on the drop of a hat, and tends to veer between depression and mania with not a terribly great deal of time spent in-between. He usually tends to remain lucid and rational regardless of his mental state, but when he's manic, he can veer straight into "full fledged supervillain" mode. A sharp contrast to the man when he's in his more balanced phases, who genuinely comes across as a man who bears no small amount of regret for the harsh actions he must take to protect his people.
 * Survivor: Magneto has a tremendous survivor's instinct, forged and tempered by suffering through some of the greatest atrocities humanity has inflicted upon its' own kind and living to tell the tale. This should not in any way be considered cowardice, for Magneto will willingly enter dangerous situations and risk mind and body almost too easily in pursuit of his goals. It's just that he really seems to have a knack for pulling through situations that would cause most people to give up. When it comes to Magneto, there's some truth to the statement that "If I could survive Auschwitz, I can survive anything."
 * Will of Iron: Magneto has tremendous willpower. If his mind is set on something, even the most powerful telepaths on Earth have great difficulty swaying him from the course. He's been known to eject lesser telepaths from his mind through sheer willpower alone. Barring his mental instability taking him into a period of depression, he never gives up, never surrenders, and will continue a fight to the bitter end if he thinks it will further his goals. Torture and interrogation are generally all but useless against him. Pain and discomfort are fleeting things that he pays little mind to when he knows he has to focus past them. Indeed, it would not be out of place to say that Magneto may possess one of the most formidable wills on planet Earth.
 * Cynic: Magneto tends to see and assume the worst about things. He's seen the worst humanity has to offer and it's definitely left its' mark. He is slow to trust, and slower still to allow himself emotional connections. He tends to be surprised if he sees (most) humans take the more altruistic or idealistic path, even if he's intellectually aware that not all humans are the same. His entire worldview has been slanted towards seeing the "darker" side of human existence first and foremost, and it definitely shows.
 * Egotistical: Magneto has a big ego. Yes, he firmly believes his message of mutant superiority and survival, but he also sees himself as the grand leader of mutantkind, even its' "messiah" after a fashion. He's the kind of guy that just might have big portraits of himself and even statues in his home. He knows he's the kind of guy that can change the world and isn't afraid to receive a little recognition for it. Or a lot of recognition and adulation as the case may be. He's also something of a connoisseur, and greatly enjoys the finer things in life when they are available, though he's perfectly capable of "roughing it" on a level that most people wouldn't even dream of, if that's what it takes to survive.
 * Fanatic: Magneto utterly and completely believes in his cause. He -knows- to the depths of his soul that it is right and just. While he may be willing to take the time to listen to well-reasoned arguments against his stance, he is highly, highly unlikely to ever accept them. The survival and supremacy of the Mutant race is the cause that he lives for, and without it...he would be nothing but an angry old man with nothing to lose.
 * Mutant Supremacist: Magneto firmly believes that it is the right of mutants to "inherit the earth." He believes that Homo Superior lives up to its' name and that humanity is essentially obsolete. He doesn't outright hate humanity (most of the time), and at times has even loved a few of them, but he rarely sheds any tears when human lives are lost. He believes that mutants cannot be judged by humans, because humans are not their peers. They should be free to govern themselves, without human interference in any way. If that means the mutants have to put themselves on top...so be it.
 * Extremist: Magneto will do whatever it takes to achieve his goals, with only a few exceptions. He does have a certain sense of honor, but he's not immediately adverse to the idea of killing many humans if it means saving a few mutants' lives. He firmly believes that war between man and mutant is inevitable, and fully intends to make sure the mutants win, even if that means they have to fire the first shot.
 * Aristocratic: Magneto, despite being entirely "self made" in terms of his fortune and education, simply seems to exude class. He's extremely cultured and well-read, eloquent, and when he's in his right mind extremely charming and commanding. Even people that vehemently disagree with his ideals often can't help but respect the man, and often find themselves forced to concede that some of his fears and points might actually be quite valid.