MAGNUS

BIOGRAPHY

In an alternate universe, the X-Man Rogue and the occasional X-Man/sometime villain Magneto conceived a child together. Though the pregnancy was fraught with complications, Magnus was born a healthy child and the birth was considered a miracle.

As the boy grew, so too did his abilities. He inherited his father’s mastery over metal and proved early on in his life that he was destined to become even more powerful than his farther. Unfortunately, he also inherited a variation of his mother’s power. When his flesh came into contact with another’s, they were transformed into lifeless, steel statues. Because of this, Magnus grew into a distant, reclusive young man, who lived with the knowledge that he could kill with a touch. He donned a skintight, full body suit to prevent killing anyone through his touch. [Exiles (1st series) #1]

Years later, Magnus found himself plucked from his reality and drawn into a mysterious other-dimensional desert, along with five other strangers, each drawn from other realities. The group was then informed by the mysterious Timebroker that they had become unhinged from time, due to cascading ripples through time that had altered their native timelines. The group was to repair damaged realities and would be able to eventually return to their own realities once they were restored. Magnus was informed that in his altered reality his mother had been killed when he was thirteen and his father had returned to his war on humanity. [Exiles (1st series) #1]

With teammate Blink receiving a Tallus, a device that would telepathically provide the wearer instructions on their missions, the team dubbed themselves “the Exiles” and were sent on their first assignment. With the vague instruction from the Timebroker to “find your greatest teacher,” Magnus and several other Exiles assumed that meant Charles Xavier.

On this world, all superhumans had been outlawed and locked away in specialized maximum security prisons. In order to locate Xavier, Magnus fashioned a makeshift Cerebro unit with his magnetic abilities and worked with teammates Nocturne and Mimic to find Charles. The group attacked a maximum security prison in which Xavier was held and Magnus himself freed the man, performing multiple magnetic microsurgeries in order to remove machinery from his brain.

Unfortunately, the Exiles had misunderstood their mission. It wasn’t Xavier they were meant to find but Magneto, who had been Blink’s teacher on her world. The Xavier they freed was a psychopath and incapacitated the team immediately, before embarking on a mission to exterminate humankind. [Exiles (1st series) #1]

The team split into two groups, one to face Xavier and the other to free Magneto. Magnus went with Blink and Nocturne to free that reality’s version of his father, who he had been shocked to learn was a heroic man on this world. Upon arriving at Magneto’s prison, Magnus quickly learned that the prison was set to self-destruct via detonation by an atomic bomb.

Heroically, Magnus used his powers to launch his teammates and the entire prison population to safety before the bomb exploded. Unfortunately, as the bomb was made of plastic, there was nothing he could do to stop the detonation. Instead, he encased the prison within a magnetic force field, containing the atomic blast to protect his teammates, and sacrificing his life in the process. [Exiles (1st series) #2]

As it turned out, the Timebroker was a fallacy, generated by a group of insect-like aliens that had inadvertently damaged time and space in their exploration of the Crystal Palace, a mysterious facility located outside time and space. In order to repair the damage they had caused, the creatures had recruited the Exiles. After his death, Magnus’ body was recovered by the aliens and placed within a crystal wall inside the Crystal Palace. After many mission, Magnus’ surviving teammates wrestled control of the Crystal Palace for themselves and returned Magnus’s body to his parents on his homeworld, complete with a note advising them that their son had died a hero. [Exiles (1st series) #83]

Alternate Versions

Another version of Magnus, appeared as a part of the Grandmaster’s Exiles. On their first mission, the Exiles inadvertently interfered in a wager between the Grandmaster and the Collector of that world. To exact revenge on the Exiles, the Grandmaster traveled across numerous realities until he found a world that held exact analogues of all the Exiles, Earth 33629. Posing as the Timebroker, he gathered his Exiles together under the pretense that they would be fixing reality, when in actual fact they were just a trap to lure in the real Exiles. The two Exiles teams fought, until they realized they were being duped, at which point they turned on the Grandmaster. Once he was dealt with, Magnus and the rest of the alternate Exiles remained together, acting as the planet’s premier superhero team.