Plodex

Origins[]

The Plodex were a savage race native to a harsh barely habitable planet which name had since been banned from being acknowledged. The Plodex only knew dominance and because of this they constantly fought between themselves in brutal wars. That was until a Plodex warrior convinced his entire species to band together and bring war to other alien races. Soon they advanced their technology to master space travel.^[1]

Eons ago, the Plodex consumed all of their planet's natural resources and developed the world into a sprawling, overpopulated ecumenopolis. Their only hope to survive was through expansion. The Plodex began systematically colonizing other worlds, conquering any indigenous life forms and ultimately reshaping the world to satisfy their needs.^[2]

Over the span of centuries, the Plodex took control of countless planets, and their strength and number increased exponentially. Once a world had been harvested for all of its natural resources, the Plodex simply abandoned the planet and moved on to the next.^[1]

Downfall[]

As their numbers grew, the Plodex developed great leaps in the science of eugenics and genetic manipulation. They engineered their offspring to adapt to any environment and seeded thousands of worlds with eggs carrying their genetic markers.^[2]

With time more and more Plodex warriors returned to their homeworld and brought with them the mores and cultures of a multitude of different species, shattering their sense of unity and their sense of purpose. Chaos ensued and civil war followed soon after, the Plodex destroyed themselves and their homeworld.^[1]

On Earth[]

Some forty-thousand years ago, a Plodex bio-ship entered the Sol system in the Milky Way galaxy. Having discovered the planet Earth, it intended on creating a nest in one of Earth's temperate zones so as to propagate the Plodex race even further.^[2]

However, one of the star drives on the colony ship malfunctioned and it crashed into the frozen wastelands of the North Pole. Fitted with the ability to self-replicate its own internal systems, the ship began growing, insinuating itself into the firmament until it was truly one with its environment.^[2]

Although damaged, the Plodex bio-ship continued to serve its primary function. It emitted a biological summons across the land, beckoning the world’s various life forms to heed its call. The ship reasoned that whatever succeeded in surviving the journey represented the planet's dominant life form and was thus suited for genetic imprinting. Only one being managed to answer the Plodex beacon. An outcast from his human tribe, he instinctively found himself drawn north towards the partially buried Plodex ship.^[3]

Once inside the vessel, the ship's bio-mechanisms captured the outcast and used him as a living guinea pig for its experiments. The ship stripped away his skin and internal organs, slowly re-growing them in order to create a genetically perfect specimen. The harrowing experience ultimately drove the outcast mad, and he spent centuries as a prisoner of the Plodex's experiments. In time, he regained his sanity and took control of the ship renaming himself the Master of the World.^[3]

When the Plodex ship first began experimenting on the Master, it likewise continued its goal of planetary conquest. The ship launched ten-thousand eggs across the globe, fertilizing the Earth with its offspring. However, the great Ice Age swept across the planet, destroying nearly all of the eggs. One egg managed to survive and drifted along the bottom of the ocean until it finally came to rest in a bed of silt off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador.^[4]

In the year 1937, a monstrous Plodex was born on Earth and came to inhabit an island in the Atlantic Ocean. The inhabitants of the island were terrified of the monster and gave it sacrifices to satiate it and prevent it from attacking them. The Plodex was eventually slayed by Ulysses Bloodstone, Fat Cobra and Puck after they took notice of its threat.^[5]

Millennia passed until one evening, a sea captain named Thomas Smallwood, having been thrown from the deck of his ship by a terrible storm, discovered a glowing green Plodex egg on the ocean floor. He pulled the egg free and used it as a flotation device to buoy himself back to the surface.^[6]

Bringing the egg home with him, he showed it to his wife, Gladys. Gladys handled the egg and the tiny Plodex life form inside genetically imprinted itself upon her. When it finally hatched, it adopted a humanoid shape albeit with various aquatic features. Ignorant of the being's alien origins, the Smallwoods took the infant as one of their own and named her Marrina.^[2]

When Marrina was eighteen-years-old, she met James MacDonald Hudson, the leader of Canada's premier superhero team, Alpha Flight. Hudson (unaware of Marrina's true heritage) invited her to join the Canadian defense department's junior program, Beta Flight. She trained with Beta Flight for four months, honing her powers until she was ready to join the ranks of Alpha Flight.^[6]

Shortly after her mission with the team, Marrina's Plodex instincts took a hold of her. She viciously lashed out at her teammate Puck, nearly disemboweling him. Horrified by her savage behavior, Marrina dove into the sea and instinctively swam towards the North Pole. She knew that the secret of her past lied within the frozen planes, and before long she found the ancient alien spacecraft.^[2]

The Master of the World, commanding the craft, captured Marrina and instructed her on the history of the Plodex. He further revealed that another alien egg had survived the centuries. The second egg took the form of a nightmarish sea creature and began attacking innocent civilians near Lake Ontario. Marrina eventually reunited with her Plodex kin, and the two became mates, though she eventually destroyed him.^[7]

The Master of the World decided to use the Plodex technology to protect Earth and humanity when Kang the Conqueror enacted his invasion. He sent a pack of Plodex wolves to attack various world leaders to force them to side with him. The Avengers intervened and battled the Master and his Plodex wolves, the alien beasts stop attacking once Warbird took their Master out.^[8]

Return[]

Alpha Flight eventually discovered a large number of Plodex eggs still intact and that the Plodex Homeworld had repaired itself in the last thousand years, the original members of Alpha Flight decided to bring the eggs to their homeworld to give the Plodex a new opportunity to try again.^[9]

• Genetic Mimicry: Through genetic engineering the Plodex became a formless race of unsequenced genetic matter who're able to metamorphically assimilate and become enhanced by the D.N.A structure of other species.^[9] While lacking any humanoid features they are able to adjust their own physiology in order to achieve enough motor-function to enable the construction and usage of incredibly advanced technologies.^[10] Using this Genetic Access the race is capable of shapeshifting at a genetic level, possibly on a biomolecular level to chimerically bond any and all assimilated organic material.^[11] Spontaneously mutating any number of odd biophysical abilities depending on how and in what way their genetic code is automatically evolved, as was the case with Ms. Smallwood when her own Plodex gene programming became resurgent.^[1]

Superior to Earth's with warp driven starships and genetic engineering. The Plodex constructed vessels known as Devourer ships which upon landing on a planet would bury its tentacles into the ground in order to study the native species and which one of them was the dominant one.^[1] These ships were to seek out planets with lifeforms early in development, and land on most inhospitable part where they would transform into massive colonization complexes infused with the surrounding ground by absorbing materials from the water and soil. The ship would then attract every lifeform on the planet, and the specimen that managed to survive the journey would be directed for its DNA to be claimed and fed to the colony spores which would add it to the genetic code of the indestructible Plodex eggs. The facility would then launch pairs of eggs all over the planet, though a minority was guaranteed to perish.^[2]

The Devourer ships were like organisms on their own right and as a result could be used to create and grow other types of lifeforms if given command.^[2] The Plodex had developed interstellar travel such as cross-continental teleportation to facilitate their domination of worlds.^[12]

The Plodex were obsessed with conquering and claiming the land of others. It was because of this the Plodex developed the means to adapt to other lifeforms and become the dominant species of the seeded planets.^[2] They mostly lacked concepts like freedom, dignity and honor, instead being heavily invested in warmongering between themselves. The very first things the Plodex had learned was war, murder and genocide. The Plodex saw each of their members equals and were united by one single genetic imperative which they believed was to dominate and destroy.^[1] The Plodex were essentially created for war and had conquest hardcoded into their DNA.^[5]

As a result of their genetic engineering, the Plodex's gender was determined by their genetic imprint.^[13] They stored thousands of years of their pan-galactic history within their collective genetic memory.^[9]

• Marrina's Mate
• Marrina
• Mar

• The concept of the Plodex was created by writer/artist John Byrne.

• The Collector had captured a number of Plodex hybrids which he kept hibernated in order for them to not rampage across his collection.^[14]
• The plural form of Plodex is Plodi.^[1]