Kevin MacTaggertProteus

Known by many names, the Mutant who Masters Reality is often called Proteus. Originally Kevin MacTaggert of Scotland, his mutant powers manifest and no longer able to sustain himself, he possesses others. Hopping from host to host and burning through each one without remorse, his power increases with each new victim.

A Turbulent Start

Geneticist Moira MacTaggert bears a son to former Royal Marine Joe MacTaggert, a violent man, who rapes and hospitalizes her. Refusing to grant a divorce, Joe and Moira separate, with Moira keeping her resulting pregnancy from him. Her son Kevin MacTaggert is born in Dundee, Scotland. 

Despite the circumstances of his conception, Moira loves her son. Before his tenth birthday, his mutant powers emerge, and begin to consume his body. Moira’s search for a cure proves fruitless, and to save his life, she locks Kevin inside a metal cell within her research facility on Muir Island. His cell is surrounded by force fields that prevent his escape and sustain him. 

Moira lists him as “Mutant X” in her files, and Kevin lives in isolation for a decade until a battle in the facility between Max Eisenhardt, AKA Magneto, and the X-Men breaches the cell walls and disables the force fields. Kevin later emerges to find the facility deserted, and without the cell’s energy field sustaining him, his body swiftly burns out. He clings to life, his psionic energy all that remains, until embittered sailor Angus MacWhirter breaks in, seeking to blow the facility up as revenge for the destruction of his hovercraft during the Magneto-X-Men battle; instead the now-ravenous Kevin possesses his body to make an escape.

Psionic Energy Parasite

Proteus is a psionic energy being requiring human hosts to sustain himself, his power increasing with each new victim. When he enters a potential host’s body, he overpowers the resident mind and gains access to their memories and skills; the host mind remains alive but suffers extreme torment upon possession, forcing it dormant within him. Usually Proteus remains dominant in the merger, unaffected by his host’s personality and emotions, but when he possessed his father, Joe MacTaggert’s emotions strongly influenced him, possibly due to Joe’s exceptionally strong personality. His possession of both Piecemeal and the enterprising helmsman were also more akin to partnerships with the host minds, possibly due to Proteus’ maturation combined with those particular hosts’ own powers. 

Proteus’s energy matrix slowly burns out the host form, making it look increasingly withered and aged, until it finally slays the host; use of his reality-warping powers rapidly speeds up this process. Normally Proteus switches hosts shortly after they have expired, or when they are so weakened by his residency that they die within seconds of his departure, but if he departs before the body is damaged beyond repair, the host can survive and recover.

Proteus is invisible to telepathic scans and most detection devices. He can warp reality around himself with a thought, affecting organic matter, inorganic matter and energy with equal ease, though his range was initially limited to a few hundred feet, and items altered would revert to normal if his concentration was disrupted or his attention diverted elsewhere. After his rebirth and bonding to Gilbert Benson, AKA Piecemeal, his range was much greater, sufficient to affect an entire city and its inhabitants simultaneously; whether this was only a temporary boost caused by Piecemeal’s ability is uncertain. 

Proteus is vulnerable to metal, which disrupts his energy fields. Even small, removable metallic objects, such as piercings and teeth fillings, can cause him pain, but he can withstand it long enough to possess a host and remove them. Larger metal implants prevent him possessing a host, such as Logan/James Howlett, AKA Wolverine’s adamantium. However, after bonding to Piecemeal, Proteus loses this weakness, at least for a time.

Able to project his psionic energy from his hands, Proteus has a built-in offensive and defensive weapon always at the ready. Proteus retains the electronics knowledge of his first host body, Angus MacWhirter, and presumably an array of other skills from his past hosts.

X-Men Enemies

The heroic X-Men are Proteus’ main combatants since they work against his possession and reality-warping powers. After Proteus combines with Piecemeal, he finds himself up against Nathan Summers, AKA Cable’s X-Force, the New Warriors, the mutants of Muir Island, and X-Factor. The heroes ultimately defeat him to the point of Proteus’ dispersal.

Family Ties and Unwilling Host Bodies 

Born to Joseph and Moira Kinross MacTaggert, Proteus experiences an isolated life from his father, who doesn’t know he exists, and eventually from his mother after his powers emerge. Despite his mother’s efforts to find a cure for his unstable powers of possession to remain corporeal, Proteus is locked away for a decade until liberated and ravenous to possess a host body. He jumps from host to host, burning through each quickly, and tries to possess other mutants to survive but ends up making enemies of them. Through his mother Moira, he has a foster sister, Rahne Sinclair, AKA Wolfsbane.

Advanced Idea Mechanics (A.I.M.) desires to use Proteus to their advantage. They do so by employing the energy-absorption powers of Gilbert Benson, AKA Piecemeal, the abused son of the mercenary Erika Benson, AKA Harness. Benson gathers Proteus’s energies across the world and once the last pieces are brought together, Benson and Proteus combine to become a gestalt, or organized whole.

When Proteus’s energy form gets stuck on the Astral Plane, the Shadow King uses him for nefarious means. He later becomes a part of the revered group of mutant resurrectionists, The Five, and together they combine their powers of resurrection and restore fallen comrades.

A History of Violence

Desiring freedom from his confinement, Kevin while possessing MacWhirter’s body, uses his electronics knowledge to reprogram the base computer to falsely show his cell as still being sealed, but before he could slip away, his mother returned accompanied by Alex Summers, AKA Havok, Lorna Dane, AKA Polaris, Jamie Madrox, AKA Multiple Man (who can create super-powered clones of himself), and Phoenix (a cosmic entity in the form of Jean Grey). Deciding to feed before leaving, Kevin targeted Phoenix, the most powerful “mutant” present. Minutes before he made his move, his mother found MacWhirter’s gold tooth, which Kevin had removed because metal was like a curse to him, on the floor outside Kevin’s cell, and discovered his abandoned body. Kevin meanwhile had underestimated Phoenix, and even with surprise on his side, barely survived her counter-attack. He next went for Polaris, but she too fought back, and he finally possessed one of Madrox’s duplicates before fleeing to the mainland. Burning out his new form too fast, he sought a new victim in the coastal village Stornaway; his first choice, the mutant Jason Wyngarde, AKA Mastermind, was protected by a psychic shield that Mutant X could not pierce in his weakened state; however, Ferdie Duncan, returning home from the pub, was not so lucky.

Seeking his hated father, Kevin headed south and west towards Edinburgh, even as the X-Men rushed to Moira’s aid and split up to hunt him. An unidentified police officer became his next victim, shortly before he encountered Wolverine, and Kurt Wagner, AKA Nightcrawler. He tried to possess Wolverine, but was driven back by the Adamantium bonded to Wolverine’s skeleton. Ruling Nightcrawler out as a potential host due to his inhuman appearance, Kevin unleashed a reality-warping storm around his two foes, dubbing himself Proteus, the master of reality. The arrival of another X-Man, Ororo Munroe, AKA Storm, merely gave Proteus another target, one whose form he deemed suitable for his next host; however, Moira had also arrived and taken a sniper’s vantage point, driving Kevin back from Storm with a series of gunshots. Unable to see the shooter and vulnerable to the metal bullets, Proteus fled. Moira would reluctantly have slain him, but the X-Man Scott Summers, AKA Cyclops, disrupted her shot, still hoping Proteus could be caught alive. Fifty miles to the south, Proteus came upon shop girl, Jenny Banks, on Culloden Moor next to her broken-down car, and she became his next victim. In her body he finally reached his father’s house in Edinburgh, finding his mother had gotten there first and futilely tried to warn Joseph.

Immediately after she left, Proteus took his father’s body; Proteus found Joe more vibrant than previous hosts and retained his voice and mannerisms. Though it was normal for Proteus to retain the memories and emotions of his victims, for the first time he found himself influenced by them; Joe had always viewed Moira as his, and now so too did Proteus. He emerged from the house to confront Moira, stating that both he and Joe took what they wanted, and in this case, that was her. The X-Men arrived as he advanced on her, but were unable to stop his taking her hostage before fleeing atop a wave of liquid tarmac. 

As the X-Men pursued, Proteus delighted in warping the city around him; when Moira tried to reason with him, Joe’s influence caused Proteus to sadistically inflict torturous transformations on her, but shifting his attention away from the city allowed the X-Men to catch up. Proteus fought a running battle with them all the way to the top of Castle Rock, the extinct volcano on which Edinburgh Castle rests, their attacks forcing him to draw on more power and burn out Joe’s body faster. Proteus planned to take his mother’s body as his next host, but Peter Rasputin, AKA Colossus, intercepted him, throwing him into a wall, which finally destroyed his weakened host body. Proteus, now in energy form, tried to possess Colossus, but the X-Man transformed into organic steel, and plunged his hands into the heart of Proteus, disrupting his energy matrix and scattering his consciousness.

After erecting gravestones for both Kevin and Joe, Moira returned to Muir Island. Studying Kevin’s corpse, Moira deduced her son’s cellular structure might have the ability to replicate itself and bring him back to life. She briefly considered cloning him, but her lover Sean Cassidy, AKA Banshee, convinced her not to do it, and she disposed of the body. 

Though dispersed, Proteus’ consciousness survived, experiencing patterns of reason and structure, and for the first time in his life, he found peace. Wanting to exploit his powers, A.I.M. sought to revive Proteus, using the energy-absorbing powers of Piecemeal, son of Harness. They visited various points across the globe where Proteus’ dispersed energies had gathered, drawing the attention of Cable’s X-Force, the New Warriors, the mutants of Muir Island, and X-Factor (the reorganized founding X-Men, whose members included Cyclops, one of Proteus’ original foes). In Edinburgh, where Piecemeal absorbed the last and largest part of Proteus’ matrix, the reality-warper was reborn, now a gestalt of Kevin and Gilbert. He transformed Edinburgh into geometric concepts, planning to restructure the whole world into a reality of mathematical structure and order. When Moira and the heroes tried to reason with him, he informed them he did not wish to return to stealing bodies, and admitted all he truly wanted was to be normal and loved by his mothers, Moira and Harness. Realizing reality would never fulfill these demands, Proteus restored Edinburgh, then stated he was choosing to go somewhere better, and appeared to disperse.

Though his opponents had interpreted his final words to mean he was committing suicide, Proteus actually traveled into space. Eventually passing through a psionic rift into another reality, he sensed a kindred spirit, a human explorer who had gained vast psionic powers when the starship he was helmsman on had ventured where no man had gone before and encountered the rift; driven mad by the godlike power, he had eventually been slain by his best friend, the ship’s captain, with the assistance of another rift-empowered crew member. Proteus bonded with the dead man, reviving his corpse, but soon encountered both the man’s enterprising shipmates and the X-Men once more. While the X-Man Lucas Bishop and the ship’s highly logical science officer sealed off the rift, denying Proteus one power supply, Jean Grey, going by Marvel Girl, telepathically linked the ship’s captain to the spaceman, letting him reason with what remained of his friend’s humanity. Weakened and wishing to do no further harm, Proteus allowed his opponents to concentrate fire on him, seemingly destroying him.

Though not dead, merely in a low-energy resting state, he finds himself restored after Selene and Eli Bard resurrected the dead. He uses the mutant seer Irene Adler, AKA Destiny, to warp her visions and lure an unsuspecting Blindfold to Muir Island. There he possessed her and attacked the X-Men who were with Blindfold to investigate Destiny’s visions. He possessed Nightcrawler, Betsy Braddock, AKA Psylocke, Paige Guthrie, AKA Husk, and Trance until Magneto catapulted himself and Blindfold/Proteus into near-Earth orbit where he was able to shield himself from possession and change Proteus’ energy matrix and liberate Blindfold. Expelled, Proteus dispersed.

Later Proteus was found adrift in the Astral Plane by the Shadow King who used his energies to spread an infection over London. The X-Men and Charles Xavier (formerly Professor X now inhabiting Charlie-Cluster 7, AKA Fantomex’s body and going by X) defeated the Shadow King and X reconstituted Proteus. X and Psylocke confronted Proteus and when they refused to believe that he had no ill will, Proteus trapped them together and fled. Wanting to merge the real world with the Astral Plane, Proteus traveled to Fetters Hill, a Scottish village. He granted the town’s citizens the ability to make real whatever they desired though chaos ensued and the village became a collection of the villagers’ mindscapes. The X-Men arrived to confront Proteus but he erupted Fetters Hill and launched seeds into cities all over the world with the intention to transform them too. Lucas Bishop, AKA Bishop, and Anna Marie, AKA Rogue, converted Proteus’ energy and absorbed it, seemingly defeating the reality-warper.

After X and his associates established the nation-state of Krakoa, a resurrected Proteus joined The Five, a group of five mutants who combined their powers to resurrect fallen comrades. Though Proteus’ energy often and eventually burned through the bodies he inhabited, so The Five stored backup clone bodies for him to re-inhabit. Proteus helped resurrect Rachel Summers, AKA Marvel Girl, Cyclops, Husk, Warren Worthington III, AKA Angel (going by Archangel), Monet St. Croix, AKA Penance, Raven Darkhölme, AKA Mystique, Wolverine, Nightcrawler, Banshee, as well as Sophie and Esme Cuckoo fo the Stepford Cuckoos, and in doing so is revered along with the rest of The Five.