This is an Elseworlds I call the Unity universe. It's one of three separate concepts I had ideas for while working on the XXY universe-- a universe where all mutants were born of the opposite sexes. I started thinking about, well, what if only one person swapped? Later I proposed this as Alara's Genderswap Challenge.
The three stories I had in mind were swaps of Xavier, Magneto, and Magneto again. The first, "In Love And War," featuring a bitter Magneto plotting his revenge on his wife Charlotte Xavier, was done last year, and is also on my Elseworlds page, one up from this. The last one, "The Fall of the House of Von Doom", is in the works and is a tragedy featuring a marriage between a female Magneto and Victor von Doom and what a Staggeringly Bad Idea it is. The Unity universe is the happy one of the three, and actually the major difficulty in it is finding credible conflicts to stand up against the combination of Xavier and his loyal, ruthless wife. :-)
I give Chris Delaney credit for the version of Erika who appears in the Unity universe-- originally I couldn't think of how to do a standalone genderswap of magneto without repeating ground i covered with XXY's Polaris. he suggested a version of the character who, like the male version, is a bit more traditional about gender roles, and therefore seeks the more common female route to power for strong-willed intelligent women... find a suitable man and support his goals. Somehow the character mutated, however... she seemed totally unwilling to ever be someone who defined herself in terms of "her man." So while she stands by Charles, she's definitely still her own person, acting for what she believes in. :-)
I also give Chris credit for some of Erika's backstory, some of which appears in the first story, "A Letter to a Friend." He told me a tale about Albert Einstein-- apparently Einstein couldn't do math, and relied on his wife, a brilliant mathematician, to do the math for his theorems. he didn't give her credit, divorced her when they were middle-aged, and she died in poverty in France. I became intrigued by this story, so she became the character of Rena Schoenberg-Strausser, and since Einstein's age was all wrong to have had a wife who got caught in Auschwitz, her husband, Aaron Schoenberg, is more a composite-- the personal life and fame of Einstein, some of the achievements of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and the personality of a total SOB. Aaron is not to be confused with any real physicists! (Not that real physicists can't be SOB's, just that I don't know any real physicists well enough to write about them.)
Erika Xavier writes to her old friend Rena to clear up some of Rena's misconceptions about Erika's work with her husband Charles.
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