St. John Allerdyce was originally a money-hungry young man who drifted from job to job around the South Seas before eventually becoming a journalist for an Australian wire service as well as a popular, if not critically acclaimed, Gothic romance novelist. Allerdyce eventually met the shape-shifting mutant terrorist Mystique and was recruited into her terrorist group, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, as Pyro. The Brotherhood’s first public appearance was an attempt to assassinate outspoken anti-mutant activist Senator Robert Kelly, but they were defeated by the team of mutant adventurers the X-Men.
After tiring of being hunted as outlaws, Mystique offered the Brotherhood’s services to the U.S. Government and so they became the government-sponsored Freedom Force team. On their first official mission, they were sent to arrest the self-styled mutant master of magnetism, Magneto. The government ultimately disbanded Freedom Force after a disastrous mission in the Middle East during which they battled the Arabic super-team Desert Sword. Pyro and his teammate the Blob were captured by the Iraqi military and forced to serve as personal bodyguards to the Iraqi commander until the acrobatic mutant Toad bartered for their freedom and they joined his new incarnation of the Brotherhood.
Pyro eventually left the Brotherhood after contracting the deadly mutant-killing Legacy Virus and went to join the mutant “leper colony” for Virus sufferers on the island owned by acclaimed author Jonathan Chambers to ease his pain. Pyro ultimately left and turned to crime to finance a treatment until the Virus caused his powers to begin flaring out of control. Pyro then briefly joined a team of other Virus sufferers in an unsuccessful search for a cure.
Pyro ultimately opposed Mystique and her new Brotherhood during their second attempt on the life of Senator Kelly. Pyro sacrificed his life to stop the assassination, forcing Kelly to rethink his stance. Kelly was later killed whilst giving a pro-mutant speech by a protester who believed Kelly to be a traitor to the anti-mutant cause.
Recently, Pyro was revived with an alien techno-organic virus.
