BIOGRAPHY - Page 4
Legion maintained his Force Warrior memories and persona after reality was restored, giving him a more adult outlook and stability than he had possessed in the past. In the hopes of finding a better way to address his continuing schizophrenia, Xavier and Nemesis consulted with Reed Richards and designed a neural switchboard for David, worn like a keypad on his wrist. By dialing up the identification numbers for his personalities, he could access their powers for a period of time without being overwhelmed by their minds or outlooks. It was hoped that this interface, stressing integration over separation, would be more acceptable to Legion’s mind in the long run. [X-Men Legacy (1st series) #248]
While testing out his new equipment, though, Legion discovered some of his personalities appeared to be missing. Described as a synesthetic interference and “a color that tastes like screaming,” David found nothing but a void when trying to dial up six different personas. A quick investigation confirmed that, after Moira gave physical form to all of his personalities during the Age of X, six of them did not return to his mind when reality was restored: Chain, Time-Sink, Endgame, Susan in Sunshine, the Bleeding Image and Styx. Fearing what Legion’s notoriously unstable personalities could do when left to their own devices, Cyclops authorized a team of X-Men to seek out the missing pieces of Legion’s mind so that he could reabsorb them into the whole. Effectively deputized into the X-Men, David joined the likes of Magneto, Rogue and his own father as teammates on this quest. [X-Men Legacy (1st series) #249-250]
On their first mission, the team captured Time-Sink on Tenerife, in the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa. The group stalled the time-manipulator long enough for Xavier to craft a blindspot into his mind, letting Rogue get close enough to touch him. Legion reabsorbed Time-Sink and Rogue’s insight into his memories led them to the next targets in London. [X-Men Legacy (1st series) #250]
Legion and the X-Men next faced off against Chain, a personality whose viral touch enabled him to transform the entire city into an army of armed duplicates. They were forced to fight through thousands of innocent people turned into soldiers against them in order to find Chain 1(a), the original and template who had converted the people of London. Legion and the field team eventually chose to lay low for a time until Professor Xavier, back at the Blackbird, could telepathically locate 1(a). In the meanwhile, they were confronted by Susan in Sunshine, whose empathic powers prodded the revelation that Cyclops had deliberately placed Magneto on the squad in case Legion proved to be a threat and needed to be killed. The amplified emotions set Legion and Magneto at each other’s throats until Rogue pacified them. The effects wore off once Susan was distracted and Legion reabsorbed her into his mind. Chain 1(a) was located and reclaimed as well soon after, but the X-Men quickly realized they had been duped. Styx, the ringleader of the rogues, had deliberately separated them from Xavier in order to capture him. He then baited a trap for Legion and the others in Paris. [X-Men Legacy (1st series) #251]
After arriving in France, Legion used Time-Sink’s power to freeze the entire population of Paris in time, allowing the X-Men to move about uncontested. However, the selective immunity to the time freeze Legion allowed himself and his teammates also extended to his splinter selves, as became clear when Rogue was confronted by the Bleeding Image, the living voodoo doll. The Image had been touched by Styx, placing him under the soul-keeper’s total control, and he deliberately blew himself up using a suicide bomb to incapacitate Rogue with his pain-transfer powers. The X-Men retired to an empty penthouse so that Rogue could recuperate and a plan could be formulated, but the long term use of Time-Sink’s power was beginning to weigh on Legion’s dominance of his own mind.
In private conference, Legion and Rogue concluded that Styx had planned things out too thoroughly and they needed to think outside the box to throw off his arrangements. They decided to use Rogue as a decoy for Styx, with Legion using Chain’s power to convert her into a copy of him. Proclaiming that Rogue was still too injured to proceed, “Legion” took the X-Men out to confront Styx. Deep in the Paris catacombs, Styx held the X-Men at bay by outfitting all his soul-slaves with more suicide vests and used the last splinter personality, Endgame, to occupy Magneto and the others while engaging with “Legion” personally.
Not satisfied with merely being free of Haller’s mind, Styx wanted to claim his soul and with it Moira’s power over all of reality. Unsure of the outcome if Legion fought back from his “death touch,” Styx used the threat of his innocent slaves to compel “Legion” into submitting voluntarily. Just as Rogue and Legion planned, however, Styx was unable to access Haller’s own soul through Rogue’s Chain-converted body. Therefore he could not access Moira or any of Legion’s other power-personas, and instead had to deal with the unique feedback of his soul-stealing touch interacting with Rogue’s still-active absorbing power. While Rogue and Styx counteracted each other, the real Legion arrived and re-absorbed Endgame, freeing his fellow X-Men from the battle. They arrived to find Styx and Rogue hopelessly entangled with one another, as Styx’s absorbed souls were forcibly returned to their true forms. Legion pulled Styx back into his mind and, with the help of the re-ensouled Xavier, separated Rogue from him and locked away the last wandering piece of his mind once more. [X-Men Legacy (1st series) #252-253]
While recovering from the ordeal with his splinter personalities, Legion was brought by his father to an isolated monastery in Tibet. His shaman, Merzah, helped David re-establish his sense of self-control. His personalities were once again isolated in a prison-like mindscape, dubbed the Qortex Complex by David. With his mental image of Merzah supporting him as the "Hazeguard" in the Complex, David took the role of the "Xtractor" to drain powers from his personalities for his own personal use whenever he chose.
Whatever progress David made in Tibet, however, was completely undone when he learned of Xavier's death fighting against Cyclops and the Phoenix Force. His mental defenses crumbled, unleashing a wave of energy that devastated the monastery, killing his shaman and all those present. The Qortex Complex also collapsed in his mindscape, bringing about a full-scale jailbreak with David mentally on the run from his splinter personalities. Many were unstable to begin with, and all were angry over being caged. Various personas went on a scattered rampage through China until David regained enough control to emerge as the dominant personality again.
As he regained control over himself, David was confronted by an animated pair of eyeballs that bizarrely shaped a humanoid body for themselves from a passing beast. Stuck between this mystery being and the Chinese troopers hunting him, David gathered enough self-reliance and determination to claim control of Tyrannix the Abominoid in his mindscape, which translated into regaining telepathy in the real world. After disabling the troopers, David attempted to read the "mind" of the eyes as they fled, and received a mental flash of two young children being mistreated in Japan for their mutations. [X-Men Legacy (2nd series) #1-2]
Thinking he could pick up where his father left off, David traveled to Japan with the intention of freeing the mutant twins from their captors. Unfortunately, he was being manipulated -- the eyes had allowed David to extract that vision, leading him into a confrontation with the heirs to the radiant master, Ogun. The twins, Karasu and Sojobo Tengu, willingly used their spiritual gifts out of obligation to Ogun's house for raising them. Caught in the trap, David nevertheless asked the Tengu twins if they truly wanted to act as interrogators and executioners for criminals, regardless of obligation. Sensing their hesitation, David compared their struggle to his own conflicted feelings for his father and reasoned that, just because their elders were due respect, didn't mean they were right about everything. Swayed by his new approach to “The Dream,” Karasu and Sojobo agreed to leave with David... right before the X-Men arrived, also manipulated by the eyes into believing David was there to harm the children. [X-Men Legacy (2nd series) #3]
David tried to explain his innocence to the X-Men but, after they tracked his rampage through Tibet and China, Wolverine's team was in no mood to listen. Instead, David had Karasu and Sojobo telepathically bolster his efforts to access splinter personalities in his mindscape and combat the X-Men. The fighting continued in the real world until David was overcome by Ruth Aldine, the X-Men student named Blindfold, who shut him down on the mindscape. Ruth was surprisingly flirtatious with David during their "psychic combat," jokingly calling herself his nemesis and kissing him before getting brutalized by a new splinter personality. Having arisen in the aftermath of Charles Xavier's death, this personality presented itself as a golden-skinned version of Xavier himself, but was more frequently referred to simply as "The Beast." With his powers now unreliable again and the conflict escalating, David left the Tengu twins with the X-Men before they were further endangered by the misunderstanding. [X-Men Legacy (2nd series) #4]