History
Protaris is a planet in the Regreb system, inhabited by the Protar, also called the Protarians, a race of highly advanced mechanical humanoid beings.
When the Protar realized they had reached an evolutionary dead-end, what with their climate changing so drastically, and in a manner to whose results they would not be able to adapt, that within a matter of years they would not be able to inhabit it, they launched a project to create a new form of Protarian life based on a series of artificial biological beings that they would secretly embed on alien worlds to absorb their cultural and physiological advantages and pass the data along to the next model in the chain. The project proceeded well until the penultimate version, Model X3Z embedded on Srenesk, was altered by the people among whom he had been embedded in an experiment to harness biospheric energy, a power that the observing Protarians knew was too volatile for him to use safely. This meant that if X3Z received the power, then all the Protarians's plans to perpetuate their culture by creating their successor species would be ruined. The Protar raced to Srenesk in an attempt to halt the experiment, but they were too late; moreover, their rapid approach alarmed the Sreneskians, believing it to be the sign of a hostile invasion. The Sreneskians deployed X3Z to use his new powers to repel the invaders, only to lose control of his biospheric power upon unleashing it in such large quantities as the Protarians had feared, resulting in a catastrophe in which X3Z accidentally wiped out all life on the planet except his own. X3Z continued to believe the mechanical invaders were the ones responsible for the death of his world and fled. The Protarians pursued him to Earth, where the final model, known there as James-Michael Starling, was embedded. James-Michael had automatically inherited the biospheric energy-harnessing power around the same time that the Protarian androids disguised as humans he believed to be his parents were killed in a car accident. For the sake of public safety, the Protar had marked both the final models of their experiment for elimination. Unfortunately, they were never able to communicate their purposes to others, so everyone who saw the Protar agents on Earth believed them merely to be killer alien robots.
A Protar
Omega was eventually killed on Earth, and the Protar returned in force shortly afterwards to find and destroy the last errant model, James-Michael. At the same time, the boy's guardians had enlisted the Defenders to find him since he had recently ran away from home. The Defenders clashed with the Protarians, whom they had identified as hostile invaders, but the Protar received their heaviest losses from James-Michael's biosphereic powers, which were growing rapidly more unstable due to the stress he was under. Moondragon's psychic powers were able to end the overall conflict by recognizing the Protar's true intentions, but was unable to stop James-Michael from overloading his powers. Only his desire not to hurt his friends moved James-Michael to turn the power inward, destroying himself, and finally ending the biospheric energy threat as well as the Protar's ill-fated experiment.
It is not known whether the Protarians became extinct as the result of the failure of their experiment, as they had feared they would when embarking upon the said experiment.[citation needed]Notes
- The names "Protaris", "Regreb", and "Srenesk" are not mentioned in any of their original comic appearances. They come from the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe entry on Omega the Unknown.