4188. Brood Queen

The Brood are insectoid aliens who on average are 8' long. Their weight is variable and the average eye color is either yellow or red. There are different appearances and abilities for the different types of Brood. Drones are the lowest type of Brood who mostly take orders from the Queens and Empress. Drones are brown and are usually warriors. The Queens are brown, usually larger and stronger than the drones, and can expel a paralyzing liquid from their mouths. Queens may inject eggs into a host. As the eggs hatch the host becomes a Brood retaining all of the hosts knowledge and abilities. The Brood Empress is also brown and is the most powerful of the Brood. She is massive and is believed to be unable to move from her lair on the Brood's central nest world. The Empress is able to reproduce asexually by laying eggs. These eggs hatch into Firstborn. The Firstborn are green, usually larger than Queens, and are covered in super-durable bony armored plates. The Firstborn are also able to teleport, apparently through technological means and Firstborn are fierce warriors. All Brood have a psychic link to the Brood Empress.

One of the Brood's earliest known conflicts was against the Eidolon Host; warriors clad in intelligent "warwear" body sheaths. Subsequently, the Brood made enemies of both the Shi'ar and the Kree. Capturing Kree Admiral Devros, the Brood infected him with a royal embryo. Devros then came to perceive himself as the Brood King, a perfect synthesis of blue-skinned Kree military facility and Brood physical prowess, and sought to similarly convert the other blue-skinned Kree while transforming the pink-skinned Kree into drones. Devros and the Brood were opposed by pink-skinned Kree Captain Mar-Vell. Though he slew both the Brood Queen and Devros, Mar-Vell himself had been infected and began transforming into a Brood King before he was saved by Medic Una, who used a modified Omni-Wave Projector to destroy the embryo within him.
The Brood have since repeatedly clashed with Earth's X-Men. The Brood had allied with the rebel Shi'ar warrior Deathbird, who was seeking to gain control of the Shi'ar Empire from her sister, Lilandra Neramani. Following Corsair, leader of the space pirates the Starjammers, to Earth; the Brood were opposed by the X-Men. During the encounter, the Brood Warrior-Prime, Skur'Kll, was slain by Wolverine, beginning a long-standing mutual hatred between the feral X-Man and the Brood. The Brood later returned, led by the Imperiatrix herself, and captured the mutant heroes, implanting each with a Queen embryo. Wolverine's mutant healing factor was able to purge the embryo from his system; however, Storm began transforming into a Brood. Swept out of an airlock before the change could be completed, she was saved by an infant member of the Acanti who was destined to be a Prophet-Singer, its race's new leader. Bonded physically and psychically to the baby Acanti, Storm and the X-Men agreed to help liberate the Acanti from the Brood's enslavement and located the Acanti's racial soul in the corpse of the Acanti's former Prophet-Singer on the Brood's homeworld. After a pitched battle, the energy of the soul purged the embryos from within the X-Men and crystallized the Imperiatrix as it destabilized the planet, causing it to explode.

Returning to Earth, the X-Men discovered that the Brood had implanted their founder Professor Charles Xavier, with a Queen egg. Under its control, he had formed a team of trainees called the New Mutants, which the Queen intended to be Brood hosts. The Queen transformed Xavier's body, but the X-Men and New Mutants were able to delay it long enough for Xavier's mind to reassert control. Xavier ultimately survived after his mind was transferred into a cloned body created by Sikorsky of the Starjammers. Later, one of the surviving Brood Queens encountered the New Mutants' Magik and her ally Lockheed, an alien dragon whose race, the Flock, are long-standing enemies of the Brood.

Seeking revenge on the X-Men, the Brood again attempted to invade Earth. Implanting paramedic Harry Palmer with a Queen egg, the Brood sent him out to infect mutants, hoping to create a Brood force with abilities to rival those of the X-Men. Attempting to ambush the mutant heroes, the Brood-infected mutants - Blindslide, Brickbat, Dive-Bomber, Lockup, Spitball, Temptress, Tension, and Whiphand - gained the upper hand initially; but after realizing that the hosts were beyond saving, the X-Men slew the Brood mutants in pitched battle. During the fight, Palmer's medic partner Josey Thomas, also Brood, implanted Hannah Conover, wife of Reverand William Conover, with a Queen egg, hoping to establish a beachhead on Earth. Under the guise of faith healing, Conover began to create a force of Broodlings loyal to her.

During this time, the Brood infiltrated the New Orleans Assassins Guild, but were defeated by the combined forces of the X-Men, the Ghost Rider, and assassin Bella Donna Boudreaux. Following this, another Brood Queen sought to make hosts of both Ghost Rider and the X-Men Gambit, and sent out drones disguised as policemen to find them. Teaming up, Ghost Rider, Gambit, and Wolverine located the Brood Queen's nest in New York City and destroyed it. Soon after, Conover began to reject the Brood Queen embryo growing within her, and so the Brood Empress dispatched a squad of Firstborn to kill Conover and those she had transformed. Though Conover's Broodlings were all killed, the X-Men were able to place Conover in cryogenic stasis, thus severing her link with the Brood collective. Believing Conover to be dead, the remaining Firstborn killed each other. In the future timeline of the X-Men Bishop (Earth-1191), a faction of benign Brood are known to exist, though it is unknown whether Conover was the originator of this group. Soon after, the Brood attempted another invasion of Earth, sending a Queen to build a hive in the jungles of the Indonesian archipelago near Madripoor. They attacked a team of naturalists, but one escaped and alerted the X-Men. The Queen was soon confronted and slain by Wolverine, who had become akin to folklore in the Brood community.

The supposedly destroyed Imperiatrix returned, planning to implant Earth's most powerful superhumans with eggs to create an army of super Brood. Allying herself with the Brotherhood of Badoon, the Imperiatrix traveled to Earth and, with the Badoon's technological aid, teleported many of Earth's heroes onboard her craft. Using holo- and nano-technology, the Badoon posed as the Coterie, a fictitious race of alien gamesmasters that offered knowledge in exchange for the heroes entertaining them in a "contest of champions." Earth's heroes ultimately discovered the truth and banded together to rout the Badoon and the Brood. Defeated, the Badoon fled, but not before the Brood Imperiatrix was able to stow away onboard their escape craft. She subsequently slew the Badoon's Brother Royal for his failure, and infected the remaining Badoon to serve as hosts.

After an intergalactic council deemed Earth a threat and sought to transform it into a penal colony, a group of Brood sought to use the ensuing chaos to establish a foothold on Earth. A Brood bounty hunter named Tyrus Krill, whose family had been infected by the Brood he was tracking, arrived on Earth and enlisted the aid of Wolverine in destroying them. However, Krill himself had been infected and, after the Queen was killed, he transformed into Brood, forcing Wolverine to slay him.

Trying to invade Earth yet again, the Brood intercepted NASA's Mar's Lander and used it to infiltrate the space station Simulacra. Receiving a distress call, the X-Men teamed up with the Fantastic Four to investigate, bringing them into conflict with the Brood. The situation escalated with the arrival of a Brood invasion fleet in Earth's orbit; however, the heroes were able to repel them after Mister Fantastic had the X-Men's Emma Frost project a mass hallucination into the Brood's minds that Earth was being attacked by both Galactus and the Phoenix Force.

Recently, a cadre of Brood warriors arrived on Earth in Spaulding, Georgia where they were opposed by Ms. Marvel. Meanwhile on the planet Sakaar a batch of Brood warriors were freed from the crystallization that caused their homeworld to explode. There the Brood warriors fought as gladiators and all but one Brood were killed in the fight. As the Hulk arrived on Sakaar the Brood joined his forces and helped liberate Sakaar from the Red King's control. After a few moments of peace a bomb sent with the Hulk exploded killing a great percentage of the planet's population as well as the Hulks wife, Caiera the Oldstrong. Enraged the Hulk and his warrior friends left Sakaar and are now terrorizing the Illuminati members and the Earth.