Marvel-ous Ninjutsu

00042. Hero or villain?

It started off as a normal day for most people around the world. That was until anything that was remotely connected to the internet started to act up by posting the old style 'Please Stand By' message. Televisions were next, followed by radios, everything that could was repeating the same message. The only thing that was not targeted was airplanes.

After a few minutes of the message being broadcast most of the world stopped to see what was happening. Computers, televisions, anything that had a working screen that could pick up the transmitted signal finally changed. It was all black at first before it slowly faded in showing a man wearing a red and purple helmet. As the man began to speak, everything that received the transmission which had speakers began to play perfectly translated audio of what he said.

"My name is Max Eisenhardt, better known to most of the world as the mutant terrorist Magneto."

Magneto paused and removed his helmet as the video feed zoomed out a little to show Magneto seated in a chair. He was wearing a very nice fitted dark gray colored three piece suit which complemented his silver colored hair nicely. After placing the helmet to the side he looked back at the camera as he said, "I am using this broadcast today to clear up some mistakes I have made over the years that have caused me to be labeled as a terrorist."

Magneto paused for a moment and looked up towards the ceiling, after a few moments he let out a sigh, then looked back towards the camera as he said, “I had a whole speech made for this but I am not going to use it. The speech wasn't good and would just be a waste of everyone's time and I could sum up the whole thing in a single sentence. I am a hypocrite.”

Magneto shook his head as he said, “In trying to protect mutants, I slowly became something I hate to the very fiber of my being and I didn’t even realize it. Not until recently that is.”

Magneto had a far away look on his face as his eyes became slightly unfocused as he said, “When I was a boy, my family fled from nazi Germany to Warsaw Poland. We were unlucky and ended up stuck there in the Warsaw Ghetto after Germany invaded. After a while we were eventually able to escape. But the bad luck didn’t end and my family was caught soon after we escaped along with some friends of our family.”

The video zoomed in showing only Magneto’s face where you could see the light sheen in the corner of his eyes. His voice cracked just the tiniest bit as he said, “They executed my entire family. I only survived because of my father, who pushed me into the pit behind us as they started to shoot. I was left covered in the bodies of my family and friends for over a day before I was able to claw my way out. You could almost say I was lucky because they didn't fill in the pit when they finished tossing all the bodies in.”

Magneto blinked a few times and his eyes became more focused as he looked back at the camera, which zoomed back out to show him sitting in the chair again. He took a deep breath before he said, “It didn’t take long for some nazi’s to find me and throw me into the Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp.” As he talked he raised up his left arm and slid his sleeve up, the camera zoomed in on his arm to show a faded tattoo that read ‘A-B-24005’.

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The camera zoomed back out slowly as Magneto pulled his sleeve back down before he said, “When I was there I worked as a Sonderkommando and it was where I witnessed first hand the horror’s man can inflict on each other, just for someone being different from them. It was there I learned the true brutality that humans were capable of.”

His eyes unfocused slightly, remembering something as he said, “It was there that I promised myself I would be better than the people who imprisoned me, that all humans are equal and should be treated with respect and dignity. That I would never become like the people who were keeping me in shackles.”

He let out a hollow laugh as he said, “How well I did trying to keep that promise…”

Magneto shook his head as he said, “I am not really sure how I survived the next few years, when so many people around me died. But I clung on to life stubbornly and somehow I survived that hell. It was sometime after I was released that I finally awakened my powers.”

Magneto held his right hand out and his helmet lifted up and began to float around his hand as he said, “It was also when I started going down the wrong path and becoming like the people I hate. When I gained my powers I thought foolishly that I was somehow chosen. That I was somehow better than everyone else who didn’t have powers. It was my hubris that was slowly turning me into what I hated and I never even noticed.”

Magneto’s helmet floated back down and he put his arm back on the chair as he said, “It wasn’t too long before I met another person like me and we became close friends. We spent countless hours in debate on how mutants and humans should interact. They argued for peaceful coexistence, while my early life made me believe that coexistence would never work. I believed that humans were too short sighted, were too quick to judge, that they would always hate anything different from themselves… How right I was in my argument and yet so wrong.”

Magneto chuckled for a moment before he said, “Me and my friend parted ways after a while, they had their own goals and ambitions, which were very different from my own. They went on trying to work peacefully with humans and to make a better world. I spent time hunting down ex nazi’s and looking for other mutants under the fake name, Erik Magnus Lehnsherr. It was during this time that I met a few mutants who thought like me, so we decided to form a group to find more like minded people like us.”

Magneto shook his head and said, “In hindsight, it was a terrible idea. The echo chamber that was created from all of us being together just fueled my beliefs that mutants were superior to man. That coexistence would never work and it would be better if mutants being the superior race were to rule over humanity."

Magneto looked sad as he said, "Sounds a lot like a certain group that took over Germany many years ago. And when I look back on my past actions, I realize now I was becoming just like that group." 

Magneto shook his head again as he said, "It was my arrogance, my unwavering belief that I knew better because I had seen humans at their worst. That only I had what it took to lead mutants to a better future. All these years I worked towards my goal and what do I have to show for it?"

He frowned a little as he said, "I have nothing but regrets. Everything I did, if I had just taken the time to think logically, to consider what my actions looked like to everyone else… Maybe I would have actually achieved something. Instead I am now labeled as a terrorist and in the words of someone I met recently… The mutant equivalent to Hitler."

Magneto took a deep breath and then said, “I can not fix my past actions and I won’t ask for forgiveness for them either. But I want the world to know that going forward I no longer see the fake line I made between mutants and humans. While I might have powers compared to other people, I can be just as short sighted, judgemental, and narrow minded as everyone else in the world.”

Magneto looked humble as he said, “I am the same fallible human as you are and I wish to say that I am sorry.”

Magneto bowed his head for a few moments and was silent. When he looked back up his face was hard as he said, “I still plan to fight for my fellow humans that have powers. But moving forward, me and the people I work with will be completely transparent in our actions and motivations.”

On the bottom of the screen a website address appeared, and after it did, Magneto said, “Early this morning, I worked with a group of people to destroy a facility that was kidnapping people with powers and their immediate families. We were lucky enough to rescue a handful of people, but we were unlucky because they had been in operation for years."

Magneto gave a slightly sad smile as he said, “After our successful rescue operation, we executed everyone who worked for that facility for their crimes and completely destroyed the base itself. We will not disclose the employees names to protect their family from people looking for payback, but we did inform their family of their deaths.”

He let out a tired sigh as he said, “The website below has a complete list of everyone that they kidnapped, tortured and killed over the years. I would encourage anyone who has missing friends or family to check the website, the amount of people they took over their few years of operation is staggering. Pictures of the missing people are also on the website to make it slightly easier for people to identify them. To the families who would wish to bury their dead, I am sorry to say that we have no bodies to give you.”

Magneto’s eyes narrowed just slightly as he said, “While we were able to take care of this facility today, we weren’t able to take care of the people who were funding them and still have no clue who they really are. It won’t stop us from looking for them and others like them. From now on, any action the people I work with take will be posted on this website along with any information we deem important public knowledge like the list of victims we currently have up.”

Magneto relaxed a little as he said, “I don’t want anyone to think we are trying to purposely hide information. Anything not deemed ‘important public knowledge’ will be held back because of respect for the dead. The general public really doesn’t need to see the videos we found in that place, it made my time in the camps look like a weekend holiday.”

Magneto put on a smile as he said, "To everyone who watched or listened to this broadcast, thank you for your time.

The video feed slowly faded to black, before every television went back to whatever it should be playing. All radio’s went back to normal and computers were back to normal, except they were opened up to the website that was linked during Magneto’s broadcast.

During the broadcast, everyone who owned a relay station, network substation, satellite or anything else that was sending out the signals was frantically trying to restore control of their systems. But nothing they did helped unless they completely cut the power and only a few people tried that method.

Within an hour of the broadcast smarter news agencies were making special reports about the broadcast and the website that was posted. What they found when checking the website was that the missing people were from all over the world. Almost one hundred and fifty thousand people were posted on the website and the outrage from the general public was massive. 

The fact that someone labeled as a terrorist was the one who stopped this group of people was also under debate. Some people were celebrating him and the people he worked with as heroes. Others thought that they acted as vigilantes and should have gone to the proper authorities with the information they had and to let them handle it. 

Yet another group was calling Magneto and the people he worked with as terrorists and murderers, that they killed innocent people and that everything on the website was mutant lies. That they themselves kidnapped all those people and were just trying to hide the truth. There was even a group that was upset that this group of people killing mutants was now gone.

While the general public was outraged about the news, most governments around the world just posted blank statements about what happened and that they didn’t support his actions but didn’t condemn them either. But behind the scenes they didn’t appreciate what Magneto and the website represented and they were doing their best to track down where the website was hosted to take it down. Others were trying to block access to the site, but everything they attempted didn't work. As soon as they implemented something, it would somehow just disappear and the site would still be accessible. Most governments spent hours trying different things before they finally gave up.

Only one government was different from the rest and praised Magneto for his actions. Israel made a statement saying that Magneto was always welcome to come home whenever he wanted and they would gladly refuse anybody who wanted him captured for extradition. 

There was one person in the world that was more surprised than the rest of the world, when the broadcast happened. He knew about the facility and that it would be dealt with, but he didn’t know about this little stunt and it caught him completely by surprise. As soon as the broadcast started he walked out of his office and yelled, “Someone find me Coulson and Hill immediately!”

Fury slammed his office door and walked back to his desk and slumped into his chair. As he watched the broadcast with Magneto, he let out a sigh and opened the bottom drawer of his desk. He pulled out a bottle of whisky and a glass. After filling the glass most of the way, he looked at it for a moment as his phone started to ring and after a few seconds, every line on his phone was blinking red. He looked at the phone, looked at his glass of whisky, before he lifted the bottle of whisky and took a drink from it instead. Today was going to be a shit show after this and he really didn’t wanna deal with it. He planned to have a long talk with Ezekiel after he was finished dealing with this mess.