Martian

Martians are creatures native to the planet Mars, a neighbor of Earth in the Sol system.

Abilities

Martians are incredibly resilient and unique creatures. An individual Martian possesses exceptional psychic talents, able to communicate wordlessly over a significant distance. Martians are capable of shapeshifting and morphing their bodies, to the point of duplicating individual cells. With training and focus they can adapt their internal biology to a wide range of environments, though they must be specifically aware of toxins or environmental hazards to deal with them effectively. Martians can become as hard as steel or phase through solid matter. They can fly at subsonic speeds unaided and are incredibly dense and tough, allowing them to lift substantial weight. Martians breathe C02 and prefer an atmospheric temperature of around 45F. At 140F or higher, Martians actually pass out in a few minutes and may even die. Flash thermal radiation can cause extremely severe sunburns, while open flames can cause portions of their bodies to instantly disintegrate into ash. Martians have a deep primal fear of flames (even tiny ones like lighters) to the point of interfering with the focus needed to use their full abilities.

Culture

Through subconscious telepathic communication, the Green Martians share a semi-sentient race mind. They call this gestalt harmony 'The Great Voice'. The Green Martians achieved a highly organized and harmonious culture, tending to pacifism and strict rules of social courtesy. A collective race memory exists and gives all Martians insight into memories spanning eons. This psychic communion allows each Martian can get a sense of the overall mood and opinions of their culture. Infringing on the consciousness of another individual is a strict taboo. As an extension of this culture of individual privacy and social openness, it is normal for Martians to adopt one favored physical appearance in public and another in private. Due to the strong sense of the interdependency of individuals as part of society, it is normal for Martians to specialize in two fields -- one a matter of personal choice, and one to the benefit of society at large.

History

For millions of years, the Martians existed as a singular race called the Burning. Malevolent and hostile, their relative lack of technical capability kept them from being a threat to any but themselves. They thrived on fire and violence, with intense psychic battles producing burning conflagrations form which new progeny would emerge. Their presence created a shadow in the intelligence of the Demiurge, threatening to create a spreading corruption that could destroy the vast intelligence of that entity.

During the war between the Celestials and the forces of the Demiurge, the Oans decided to intervene by eliminating the Burning Martians as a threat -- or perhaps even more dangerously an ally -- to either side. The Oans engineered a mutagenic virus and spread it amongst the Burning Martians. The initial effect of this virus was to programme a crippling racial fear of their own pyrokinetic powers. A secondary effect evolved over time-- the species became dimorphic, dividing into the White and Green Martian species. The divergent races became fierce rivals for dominance of Mars.

In 14,000 BCE, the White Martians rallied and overtook the Green Martians in civil war. Many Greens were forced from their homes and into hiding. White Martians began breeding without limitations and so rapidly that they depleted many of Mars' natural resources. Within a thousand years they were so densely populated that they launched an invasion of their nearest neighbor, Earth.

The Martian invasion force encountered the Atillans and ousted them from their home aboard the Omrut Beacon. With Kree science in hand, the White Martians recognized the much-craved Celestial DNA strains that were also present in their people before Atlantean sterilization. They modified the Terrigen Mists to delete the coding for the Celestial genetic code, and released it into the upper atmosphere of Earth. 99.9% of viable humans lost their metahuman genetic potential.

The invading White Martians then attempted to build permanent portals to their homeworld, but the damage to the Demiurge destabilized their efforts. The portal remains intermittently active in Central America to this day.

Five years later, the Green Martians gained enough of a foothold on Mars to pursue their enemies to Earth. They assisted the Atillans with retaking their home on the Omrut Beacon and many White Martians were lost when their transit portal was destroyed with an invading force en route.

The Atillans burned down 100,000 acres of rain forest and killed the thousands White Martians remaining on Earth in the conflagration. This action so horrified the Green Martians that they abandoned their own colony plans and returned to Mars. Now significantly outnumbering the White Martians, the Green Martians soon became entirely dominant on Mars. The White Martians left on Mars became a relict population, living rough and barbarous lives in small, remote settlements in the Martian wildernesses. A number of White Martian colonies off-world retained their strength and dreamed of one day reconquering their homeworld from the Greens.

The Great Voice

Around 10,000 BCE, the ever-growing gestalt of subconscious psychic communication among the Green Martians reached a critical tipping point. This coincided with the restoration of the Demiurge itself. Without any individual Martian ever planning it, the group mind reached out and entered communion with the mind of the Demiurge. This triggered a great awakening of the Green Martian race, turning them in just a single generation into a race of philosophers and profound moralists. They promulgated-- quite by accident-- one of the conceptual axioms of the Life Equation. If the concept of value only exists with a consciousness to value things, all value depends on the existence of life, and thus by mathematical equivalence, if value stems from life, then life creates all value. Not long after the awakening of the Great Voice, the Martians came into contact with a group of rogue Manhunters who had, many millennia previously, refused the order to return from Oa for deactivation. Impressed by the Manhunter's utter dedication to a model of strictly moral interventionism, the Martians modelled their own policing after the Manhunters, and the order of the Martian Manhunters was born.

For thousands of years the Martians lived a quiet and peaceful existence. They mostly limited themselves to their own homeworld, though the few Martians that set out to explore the galaxy beyond was enough to let the powers of the galaxy know that the Sol System was home to a peaceful but enormously powerful species.

Darkseid

Their deep wisdom would prove to be their undoing. Approximately 1600 CE, the potent godling Darkseid sent ambassadors to meet with the Martians under a flag of peace and friendship, hoping to discover secrets or aid to help him in his quest for galactic dominance. He learned of the Martian's discovery of the logical concepts underlying the Life Equation, and deduced from that the existence of an Anti-Life equation. A number of Martians were kidnapped and taken to Apokalips in the hope that it would be possible to extract the formula of the Life Equation from their subconscious minds and derive the Anti-Life Equation from it. A force of Martian Manhunters was able to infiltrate Apokalips and rescue their compatriots, dealing significant damage to Darkseid's base and humiliating the warlord in the process.

Seeking revenge, Darkseid whispered treachery into the ear of a disaffected Martian scientist, Ma'alef'ak. With Darkseid's help, Ma'alef'ak unleashed a terrible psychic plague on his own population, a virus that interfered with the mutagenic factor introduced by the Oans all those millennia ago and triggered almost instantly fatal uncontrolled outbursts of that latent pyrokinetic ability. The Great Voice became the species' undoing, the vector through which the psychic plague spread through virtually the entire population in a matter of hours. Only a very few individuals with the willpower to shut themselves off from the Great Voice, or travelling through space and far away from danger, survived.

Sole Survivor

J'onn J'onzz came to Earth following the crash of a Kryptonian hyperspace vehicle in 1941, the first Martian visitor in centuries. Taking the name John Jones, he accepted a position as a private detective, similar to his duties as a Manhunter in the Martian police force. He spent several decades on Earth incognito, returning to Mars only briefly to make contact with the pitiful remnant of his own people. J'onnz came to recognize that the Martian race was finished, and that there were too few minds to support the Great Voice any more. Hope was not gone though -- humanity, evolved so close to the mind of the Demiurge, showed promise. After 16,000 years, the species was starting to recover from the elimination of so much of its metahuman potential by the Terrigen Mists, and there was hope that one day the racial soul of the Martians, the Great Voice, could emerge from the race mind of humanity and awaken once more.