Brainiac 5
2991 - 13-year-old Querl Dox joins the Legion of Super-Heroes in their first recruitment drive. He designs their headquarters and equips the team with flight rings.
2992 - 14-year-old Querl's time technology is stolen when Brainiac 6.0 activates and attacks the headquarters of the Legion of Super Heroes to go back in time to kill Clark Kent before he becomes Superman. Querl contacts Rip Hunter to consult on his hypertime proof. He conducts his temporal experiment, sending back Rokk Krinn, Imra Ardeen & Garth Ranzz to stop him. He also sends a message back to Vril Dox who is still in prison in the Starlog.
2993 - 15-year-old Querl employs Salu Digby after her attempt to join the Legion of Super-Heroes to instead assist in his Macroverse experiments.
2994 - 16-year-old Querl enhances Salu Digby's powers to employ her against the White Triangle Daxamites.
2995 - 17-year-old Querl discovers Connor Kent's body sealed in it's tomb inside the Phantom Zone. He revives him, and after some time manages to align his temporal technology to send him back. His work in the Phantom Zone allows him to discover the planet Bgztl and Tinya Wazzo.
2997 - 19-year-old Querl is contacted tachyon theory researcher Dawn Allen to save the life of her nephew, Bart Allen. He uses his temporal tech to send him back in time to meet Wally West. He uses a bio-synthetic trojan virus hidden in a sample of Lyle Norg's blood to hack into the entire Science Police network. he uses his access to implicate Jo Nah in the death of his childhood girlfriend to allow him to infiltrate a criminal organization.
2999 - 21-year-old Querl witnesses the accident that bathes Drake Burroughs in anti-energy, converting his body to energy. he is able to contain him and build him a suit, bringing him into the Legion of Super Heroes as Wildfire.
3000 - 22-year-old Querl is among the legion members lost in a distant galaxy. He retreats to the abandoned headquarters of Vril Dox after the Legion of Super-Heroes is disbanded and begins retrofitting it into Legion World. He unlocks Luornu Durgo's ability to mass duplicate and she staffs Legion World.
3003 - 25-year-old Querl devises a way to re-collect the ambient energy of Drake Burroughs.
3005 - 27-year-old Querl is approached by Reep Daggle to reform the Legion of Super-Heroes to end the rule of the Dominators reveals Drake Burroughs as a secret weapon. He repowers Rokk Krinn. He contacts Tasmia Malor & Tinya Wazzo and manages to restructure her powers.
3007 - 29-year-old Querl retrieves Val Armorr from within the Haplashar Terminus before the black hole opens to battle Kirt Neidrigh and the Justice League of Earth. His Legion World is recognized as a planet by the United Planets, making Querl a world leader.
Of all the members of the Legion of Super Heroes, not only is Brainiac 5 by far the one that is more entrenched in the mythos of DC... but in fact he might have a deeper and more lasting effect on the entirety of the timeline than any other character in the whole continuity.
First of all, there's the fact that he's tied to one of the single most important villains in all of DC. Brainiac had taken a lot of forms over the years and his story has morphed over and over again, but he has always remained one of the singularly important bad guys in Superman's rogue's gallery. As his backstory shifted, so too did Brainiac 5... a character that had originally simply been a descendant of an alien bad-guy had to somehow have descended from some sort of artificial intelligence. We've morphed a few versions of the story together to construct a hybrid that we think hold up and makes both Brainiac and Brainic 5 (as well as some of the OTHER spinoff characters from this legacy, Vril Dox and Indigo) all make sense and give them full access to the potential of their concept. In the specific case of Brainiac 5, that means we are making him deliberately unique, a result both of cloning technology and of artificial intelligence several hundred years in the making, giving his near-infinite intelligence weight and purpose. |
Obviously, Brainiac 5 is a convenient explanation for many of the narrative holes in a lot of other character's stories. If someone needs to have their biology altered or their powers updated... having a character like Brainiac 5 allows you to do that. His role expands even beyond that, however... into the realm of time travel.
We've spoken elsewhere about just how rare we want time travel to be in our continuity, but there need to be a FEW cases where it is possible. Brainiac is an absolute perfect source for that technology, and also a great foil for why it is used so rarely. Yes, his technology will allow him to send someone back in time, but only a 12th level intellect can possibly know if he SHOULD do it. He doesn't send people back whenever it's convenient, he only does it when it would be catastrophic NOT to. This means that he is able to calculate that it is necessary that he return Connor Kent back to his own time, or to use time travel to save the life of Bart Allen. Using this advanced knowledge makes him a wonderful tool to explain the few incidents when time travel is an absolute necessity, and to still keep it from coming up in other stories. We've also enhanced his ties to the character Vril Dox, a contemporary character that leads the modern space mercenary team L.E.G.I.O.N., actually making him the creation of a colony of Vril's clones. We originally actually made him a clone of Vril himself, but that really cheapened Brainiac 5 and the uniqueness that makes him such a special character. Hopefully we've managed to assemble him into something that does justice to his amazing potential. |