m.n. LEGACY
Joseph Parsons and Paul Revere never quite saw eye to eye; they agreed that the British were going too far, but Revere was much more of a radical separatist, and Parsons was more of a Loyalist, and didn’t want to believe that Revere’s extreme beliefs about the British plans were valid. When Parsons suddenly awoke in the night, aware of a sneak attack about to begin, he realized he’d been wrong, and went to the home of Revere to hastily apologize for doubting him.
Before this incident, Parsons would never have named his son in honor of Revere, but this incident changed that. Thus began the family tradition of sons named Paul, all of them raised with absolute confidence in the American ideal. While CT Legacy (CT here stands for Core Timeline, though conveniently it also matches Connecticut, the state where Megalopolis is) was always associated with America going to war against “the bad guys” of the time, and he was very gung-ho about charging into battle to defend Freedom and Democracy, MN Legacy still fights for America in almost every war, but is much more pragmatic about the reasons why, and this sometimes means he’s far more reluctant in his participation. To find out why, let’s look at all the powered Parsons and their war:
Joseph - CT fought in the Revolutionary War alongside Paul Revere, because America was being born and the British were evil oppressors; MN fought in that war because America was becoming its own independent nation, and Britain was an old nation that didn’t want to give up its colony. There’s very little divergence between the two at this point, but Wellspring knew where it was going to go, and was comfortable with both directions.
Paul 1 - CT fought in the War of 1812; he likely favored the Democratic-Republican Party stance that said British impressment of American soldiers was an outrage. MN was distinctly more of a Federalist, and had allies among Tecumseh’s confederacy, so he went to war under a certain degree of protest, even making an impassioned speech (luckily without the superhuman degree of charisma that would be displayed by later Legacies) at the Hartford Convention about the harm to the American economy being done by the British naval blockade, stopping just shy of outright advocating that the US sue for peace and make concessions to Britan in order to secure a perhaps smaller but more stable American nation, with several states perhaps ending up ceded to Canada.
Paul 2 - “Lucky Paul” was virtually identical in both timelines, though the distinction between his “exceptional athletic capability” power and the “vitality” power of Paul 5 is retconned a little bit, making it more clear that it wasn’t until Paul 5’s time that the Parsons sons were effectively “super-heroic” exceptions to the human norm (the aforementioned Charisma bit being likely emphasized in this retelling).
Paul 3 - Late in CT Paul 3’s life, he went to defend what would become Texas against the Mexicans, and ended up dying at a very young age compared to his ancestors. In probably the biggest divergence before modern times, MN Paul actually fought for Texan independence rather than for continued American rulership (the actual people of Texas at the time mostly did want to become Americans, but Paul was firmly allied with the Republic of Texas leadership who opposed annexation); both tasks involved fighting against Mexico, but if he hadn’t died heroically protecting US soldiers, he would likely have come home and faced a court martial for actions bordering on treason.
Paul 4 - History remembers the Civil War from a very North-centric perspective, and emphasizes the evils of slavery in the South while downplaying the more economic and pragmatic reasons behind the conflict. CT Paul saw things from the very modern perspective in this regard; as the first moderately invincible Parsons, and having very recently lost his father, Paul 4 took numerous risks to try and defuse battles rather than decisively crush the Confederate army. This is…less true of MN Paul 4, who didn’t go as far as General Grant in his efforts to shorten the war by brutalizing its presumed losers, but definitely didn’t delude himself that he was on the right side of history. He privately disliked President Lincoln’s “great emancipator” public image until the day of his own death, taking that attitude to his grave only to preserve the morale of his fellow Union officers; had he not possessed a sterling sense of duty, this Paul would likely have seen the War Between States as a conflict with no right side, and might even have deserted to go west and avoid both sides.
Paul 5 - Long before CT Paul 7 ever punched a nazi, CT Paul 5 made a sincere and nearly successful effect at personally removing Valeriano “The Butcher” Weyler from the Governor-Generalship of Cuba, dying to a fusillade of shots from Weyler’s bodyguards only a few rooms away from the savage Spaniard who had oppressed the island’s revolutionaries. The actions of MN Paul 5 were extremely different in this case, most notably completely aborting that entire assault on the governor’s mansion, as he instead worked with the insurgents to preserve their lives and ensure that a slower, more patient rebellion would ultimately succeed in freeing Cuba from Spanish rule. Pleased with this effort, the Navy reassigned Paul to the Pacific theater of the war instead, employing an experimental zeppelin to rush their most valuable asset to the more unstable Phillipine front of the war, where he was instrumental to the May 1st destruction of the Spanish fleet there, and continued to assist with operations that secured the transfer of power to American ownership of the islands. He technically survived the entire war, outliving his CT counterpart by more than half a year, but during that time had struck up a whirlwind romance with a Philipino girl whom the CT Paul never met (“our” Paul would never have considered being unfaithful to the wife back home, even in spirit, but MN Paul was both a less pure soul and was immersed in more tempestuous affairs, thus that he nearly surrendered to a fit of passion). He never yielded to the woman’s advances, but she became sufficiently embittered about this spurning that she lied to her six brothers and claimed that he had “dishonored” her, leading them to ambush the American “cad” and murder him with knives, though he’d lain four of the six low in the scuffle before the last two managed to stab him simultaneously from different angles, having instinctively figured out his invincibility power in the course of the fight, though they did not remember this insight later.
Paul 6 - World War 1 was one of the most regrettably avoidable of all wars in world history, and yet it seems almost to have been a fixed point in time; amusingly enough, nearly opposite personalities of the first Legacy saw them both enter the war at the same time for nearly opposite reasons and with wildly different motives. CT Paul 6 was eager to fight the Kaiser because of what he saw as a noble struggle against Prussian expansionism; the Entente Powers he saw as more democratic than the Triple Alliance, and thus he was eager to stop the Double Eagle flag from going up over the capitals of nations west of the Rhine. He wanted to jump into the fray as soon as it began, but America’s government at the time was firmly opposed to getting involved in what they saw as a territorial squabble amongst European powers, and it wasn’t until the sinking of the Lusitania that they changed their minds. So prior to that point they’d actually ordered Legacy to stand down, as him going and fighting alongside the French and British would have been taken as a clear signal of America entering the war; only in '17 did they finally agree to let him take part, and he was the definition of gung-ho throughout the entire remaining just-shy-of-two-years of the war, leading the charge into battle and taking fire from German machine guns while the American troops behind him fearlessly went over the trenches and boldly secured mile after mile of no-man’s land. Quite to the contrary, MN Legacy was never interested in the war, even when the Lusitania sunk; he supported the factions that wanted to keep America out of it, and had to be ordered to go to the front lines, where his emphasis was firmly on protecting the troops and keeping their morale up in the miserable meat grinder of the war, rather than helping them achieve a glorious victory through reckless actions that only his power made possible. He’s still remembered as a hero in that war, but it was more through his speeches to the American soldiers and helping them endure the hardships of trench-warfare survival; ironically the net result was about the same, as fewer soldiers died in his more cautious tactical advances, but they also made fewer sacrifice plays that could have shortened the war, and so over the course of those 18-20 months, the overall flow of combat was more predictable but not actually more efficient.
Paul 7 - the Greatest Generation saw much the same “horrors of war” in Europe and in the Pacific that would later be seen in Vietnam, but the almost theatrically evil behavior intentionally adopted by the Wehrmacht and their propaganda ministry, to say nothing of what was eventually discovered going on behind the German front lines, made it easy for CT Greatest Legacy and his fellow Americans to feel like they were the good guys and their enemies were evil. Absent that perspective, MN Greatest Legacy was a bit more sober about his actions, but actually not very different. He still saw Auschwitz and Dachau as outrages, and even before learning about them, found it easy to dislike the speeches of Goebbels and the skulls and iron crosses on Nazi helmets. The only real difference between the two is probably their reaction upon meeting with Soviet forces closing in from the other side of the battlefield in mid-'45; “our” Grandpa Legacy was probably pretty clueless that allies like Proletariat would become enemies to his country a scant five or so years later, but MN Paul 7 saw the writing on the wall early on, and treated America’s Stalin-serving “allies” with extreme coolness during the wrap-up days of the war.
Fast forward to the modern age, Paul Parsons the 8th and his daughter Pauline are both dedicated to fighting for America’s continued global hegemony in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Much more so than CT Finest and Newest Legacy, MN Paul 8 and MN Pauline continue to be skeptical of Russia, also looking with distinct uncertainty at China, as the world’s economic situation begins to take a downturn in the years just before the OblivAeon Crisis.