The Brood
The Brood are a race of highly aggressive insectoids that view all other life as either food or hosts for their young. An Brood soldier-drone is approximately the size of a small Volkswagon and weighs around 350lbs. They have both a flexible endoskeleton and a chitinous exoskeleton, along with a set of fanged mandibles capable of crushing bone and sinew. They are cold-blooded creatures and obligate carnivores. A Brood soldier can lift and carry around 400 pounds, either in grasping tentacles or on its back. Brood soldiers have stingers that can deliver a paralytic poison that is very effective against most mammalian creatures.
Individual drones are self-aware and intelligent but the dictates of their hive Queen can override any sense of self-preservation. The Brood are not just predators; they relish violence and cruelty on a spiritual level. They are a hateful and almost universally malevolent species, controlled by the Queens that oversee their hives. Every Queen is driven by an instinctual desire to infest and corrupt new life forms as a means of absorbing useful DNA configurations. It is a fortune for the races of the universe that all Queens view other hives as inferior, and will launch attacks on other hives in almost constant internecine warfare in an attempt to kill the other Queen and harvest her progenitor gland, which contains her ancestral memories and captured DNA sequences. Only the Brood Empress is capable of overriding the Queens and keeping the Brood's larger strategic interests afloat.
Queens possess the most dangerous weapon of The Brood: their stingers implant a parasite into the host that wraps around the brain stem. When the embryo is mature enough it will overtake the nervous system and slowly kill the creature. The victim secretes a resin that forms a chrysalis and over time the Broodling corrupts and replaces their DNA with Brood sequences. Once the metamorphosis is complete, the new Brood emerges as a hybrid creature with new DNA strains to contribute to the Queen's genetic library. This is in turn passed on to 'pure' Brood eggs lain by the Queen in their hives.
Brood have no culture and no industry. They make hives out of secreted mucus combined with any convenient material nearby. Brood nests are always hunting for food or victims to infest. The Queens exercise total control over their hive via telepathic command. If this colony mind is disrupted, Brood drones go insane and may attack each other, flee in panic, or even lay down and die.
History
The Brood come from an extradimensional origin point. They have been present in the universe for millions of years, occasionally used as weapons by races either advanced enough to control them or reckless enough to aim them at their enemies. The Kree notably employed cybernetics and neural indoctrination to sterilize thousands of Brood drones and use them as shock troops. This practice was abandoned when an infant Queen was able to override the Kree engineering and turned the Brood back on their captors. Every sentient race views the Brood as dangerous and many species have protocols to lay total waste to any hive cluster or egg clutch they find.
The Brood had established themselves in star systems along what had been the border between the Kree and Skrull empires, which actually temporarily halted for a few thousand years the hostilities between those races as they lost their shared border. The Brood later invaded the Earth solar system in 2015. Landfall was made in Beijing China, San Antonio Texas, and Johannesburg South Africa. Earth defenders scrambled to contain the vanguard force while the bulk of Earth's space-capable forces went to the extreme edge of the Solar System to fight back the hive fleet on slower approach.
Earth was in extreme danger and even with a substantial display of force arrayed against the invading fleet, the prospects for survival looked grim. A strike team comprised of members of the Xavier Institute launched themselves at the Brood homeworld of Acati. There they encountered the Brood Empress, who held hundreds of Queens and their hives in telepathic thrall. The X-men were swiftly captured and the Empress prepared to infest them with embryonic parasites to capture their unique DNA. At that point Jean Grey called upon the power of the Phoenix Force to protect her. The response from that primal force of energy was to wipe the Brood infestation out. Acanti was scourged clean and the Phoenix burned out the mind of the Queens, and the connection those Queens had with their offspring. The species became rare in this part of the galaxy. Though they are known to reproduce rapidly.
