Martians
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The Ma'aleca'andra, better known as Martians, are a collection of closely-related sentient species native to the planet Mars. Though once a thriving civilization, the ecological collapse of their homeworld has brought them to the brink of extinction.
History
The first inhabitants of Mars were the so-called "Black Martians". According to Ma'aleca'andran religious beliefs, they were created by H'ronmeer - the Martian byname for Ares - as a race of perfect warriors, capable of adapting themselves to any battlefield, waging psychological and psychic war as well as physical, and wielding pyrokinesis to leave flaming devastation in their wake. For centuries, the Martians perpetuated an unending cycle of war and violence, perfecting the art and technologies of war. Sources disagree on why that changed - some blame divine intervention, while others suggest a sense of cultural boredom - but eventually, the Martians turned their aggression outwards, launching a campaign of conquest that stretched beyond the horizons of Mars. To the citizens of the wider galaxy, they became known as The Burning, and their crusade of pillage and plunder swept across the Milky Way until they encountered the fledgeling Guardians of the Universe.
Having recently overcome their own social upheaval, the Guardians identified emotion as the root cause of the Martians' crusade, just as they had within their own people. Having yet to establish a force of peacekeepers such as the Manhunters or Green Lantern Corps, the Guardians sought to solve "The Martian Problem" directly, using their developing mental abilities to excise emotion from the Martian hivemind. In their hubris, however, the Guardians failed to account for the innate adaptability of the Martian species. Rather than purging emotion, the Guardians instead sundered the Martians into two distinct species, loosely corresponding to the id and ego. The White Martians were almost feral at first, driven by their emotions and base instincts; the Green Martians meanwhile were willful and serene, choosing to adopt a lifestyle of peace and harmony.
Over the millennia that followed, the Martians were left mostly to their own devices, though the Guardians of the Universe continued to watch them from a distance, diligent for a relapse into the "old ways". Over time, Martian society changed and evolved, and the Martians themselves evolved and adapted to suit their new social structures. Green Martians lived a cyclical, migratory existence of peace, cooperation, and ecological responsibility; but an offshoot that sought a more structured, civilized, and technological existence evolved to become the Red Martians, founding many of the great Martian cities, colonies, and institutions - like the Martian Manhunters, from which the Guardians of the Universe would draw inspiration for their own robotic Manhunters. The White Martians became increasingly feral and barbaric, warring against the Greens and Reds in a desperate attempt to attract the attention of H'ronmeer and earn his favour once more; and eventually, a disaffected and resentful subset of the Red Martians came to blame the Guardians of the Universe for all their social woes, "stealing" the Guardians' obsession with the emotional spectrum in retaliation of the Guardians' own cultural thefts, letting an obsession with fear convert them first into Yellow Martians, and then eventually into the Dominators.
Extinction
Eventually, the White Martian desire for divine attention escalated to overt terrorism, with atomic and later subatomic weapons of mass destruction unleashed upon the Red Martians. Their cities on Mars were obliterated, the subspecies surviving only among their offworld colonies, and the Green Martians were hunted and exterminated in an effort to prove that the White Martians were the true - and only - successors to The Burning. The White Martian holocaust caused irrevocable damage to the planet's magnetic field, and stripped away much of the planet's atmosphere, boiling away rivers and burning away forests and mosslands until Mars achieved its current barren and desolate state. White Martians still live on Mars, hidden within the polar regions far from human exploration, their physiology adapted to the harsh conditions they created, but aside from a few lone survivors and a few distant colonies, the other Martian species are nominally extinct.
Society
All five species of Martians were deeply spiritual people, the facets of their societies guided by their beliefs and the tenets of the deity they most closely revered.
Black Martians
Black Martians traditionally worshipped H'ronmeer, whom historians believe to be synonymous with Ares of the Old Gods. They revered him as their creator, and regarded chaos, war, and destruction as acts to venerate their Father. As a result, the Black Martians saw little value in much of what would commonly be considered civilization. Cities and structures were destined to be destroyed, so Black Martians lived a nomadic, tribal existence. Strength and victory were fleeting, so Black Martians rejected typical hierarchies and social orders, instead following whomever commanded the respect and loyalty of their fellow Martians at that given time. The young were raised collectively, with no semblance of familial attachment, and those seen as weak and unworthy were exiled from the tribe, to either die or be forged into something stronger amid the deserts of Mars.
White Martians
White Martians believed that the Guardians had diminished them in the eyes of H'ronmeer, turning their Father away from them. They hoped that by emulating the actions of the "True" Martians they could somehow earn his favour once again, and so took the violence and barbarism of the Black Martians to new extremes. They - and later their Yellow Martian allies - developed a cult that worshipped H'ronmeer's twin sons, Phobos and Deimos. In particular, the Whites embraced the prospect of terror as a weapon, and believed that inflicting it, and causing chaos, were victories in their own right. It was the Whites who were responsible for the weapons of mass destruction that left Mars largely uninhabitable, and who off the back of that "victory" hunted the Green Martians to extinction.
Green Martians
Green Martians rejected H'ronmeer in favour of his daughter Concordia (the Greek Harmonia). She encouraged peace and harmony, and the Green Martians interpreted that to mean both harmony with each other, and with nature: as such, they also came to revere The Green, the mystical web of energy that connects plant-based life across the cosmos. The Green Martians maintained a transitory existence to avoid overtaxing the local ecosystem, but also understood the merits of structures and infrastructure that would endure, constructing a network of burrow and hive-cities that they migrated between, surviving on a mix of hunter-gathering and seasonal agriculture.
They also understood the importance of population control, particularly given the extensive lifespans made possible by their shapeshifting and regenerative abilities. A tradition arose, with life being lived in "cycles" that consisted of sixty Martian years (~113 Earth years). The first ("0th") cycle was set aside for childhood, coming of age, education, and training: like a fruit tree that cannot be harvested until it is fully grown, or like wine or whiskey taking time to ferment. After that first cycle, a Martian continued to mature and gain wisdom - ageing like a fine wine - until they reached a time when they felt a sense of completeness. Their experiences and wisdom would then be passed telepathically to younger Martians, allowing their memory to endure. Between the harshness of their lifestyle and the constant threat of the White Martians, many Martians died before their memories could be passed on: in the rare instance of a Martian living to the end of their 12th cycle (~1500 Earth years) it was considered selfish and reckless to horde those memories and risk them being lost, and so any Martians who survived that long would usually spend their final years in religious seclusion before bringing their life to a ceremonial end.
Red Martians
Red Martians set aside their worship of Concordia, instead venerating her sister, "she who cannot be escaped", Adrestia (sometimes equated with Nemesis). While the Greens were at peace with a nomadic life beset by struggle, danger, and predation by both wildlife and White Martians, the Reds wanted to retaliate against those threats. They adopted many of the abandoned technologies of war that the Black Martians had once developed, and fortified themselves in cities, establishing a strict hierarchy, social order, and code of laws. It was the Reds who established the Martian Manhunters, a cult of law enforcement dedicated to Adrestia, whose mantra of "no man escapes the Manhunters" served as an inspiration and prototype for the Guardians of the Universe and their own robotic Manhunters. Among the technologies the Red Martians resurrected was space travel, with the Reds venturing out into the solar system in search of resources and raw materials. One of the few surviving societies of Martians are the Saturnians of Saturn's moons, descendants of those Red Martian mining colonies.
Yellow Martians
Yellow Martians developed out of hatred for the Guardians of the Universe. They saw the "blue devils" as thieves, first stealing the power and superiority of The Burning from their ancient ancestors, and then stealing the legacy of the Manhunters for their own purposes. They sought retribution not against their fellow Martians, but against the Guardians, and believed that in reuniting the disparate halves of their species lay the ultimate answer, something embodied in the cult of the twins Phobos and Deimos that they shared with the White Martians. In retaliation for the Guardians' cultural thefts, the Yellow Martians chose to respond in kind, adopting a corrupted understanding of the Guardians' knowledge of the emotional spectrum. In particular they fixated on fear - an obsession that resulted in the colour change of their physiology - believing it to be the truest form of power, and the best means through which the legacy of the galactically-feared Burning could be restored. It was this belief, and this crusade, that led the Yellow Martians to leave Mars entirely, eventually becoming the Dominators.
Physiology
All species of Martian are telepathic, capable of reading the thoughts of others, and of projecting thoughts, ideas, and messages into other minds. White Martians delight in using their telepathic abilities to inflict physical pain, while the Yellow Martians (Dominators) have developed the ability to obfuscate the senses of others, creating complex illusions and hallucinations. This telepathy extends to telekinesis as well, with Red and Green Martians using it to achieve flight, manipulate their physical surroundings, and coalesce beams of destructive energy. White and Green Martians retain the ability of their ancient ancestors to psionically manipulate or "shift" the structure, appearance, density, and other aspects of their physical forms; but this ability has largely atrophied in the Red and Yellow Martians, who have retained a specific set of physical characteristics over generations for various social and environmental reasons. Martians also possess natural regenerative abilities, affording them a faster-than-typical rate of healing, and a much slower rate of genetic ageing than many species. Having evolved on a world further from the sun than Earth, Martian eyes are sensitive to a broader spectrum of light wavelengths than those of humans, though this is not necessarily true of offworld descendants such as Saturnians and Dominators.
As a result of the divergence between the various Martian species, the physical morphology of Red and Yellow Martians differs somewhat from that of White and Green Martians: for example, Whites and Greens usually present as tetradactyl (four fingers/toes), while Reds and Yellows are pentadactyl (five fingers/toes) more like Humans or Guardians. Also, it was common for Green Martians to adopt a form with an extra set of limbs when among their tribal brethren, though those who lived among Red Martian communities would usually adopt a more humanoid form.
All Martians have a crippling and debilitating aversion to fire, which extends far beyond the psychological limitations of pyrophobia with extreme physiological effects. It is believed that this is some sort of "safeguard" coded into the Martian genome by the Guardians of the Universe when the Green and White Martians were originally separated from each other, to prevent the possibility of the Burning Martians ever reforming, though the Guardians refuse to admit that this is the case.
Technology
Like the Martians themselves, much of their technology is bio-adaptive. In a neutral state, Martian metamaterials are often silver in colour, and are composed of tiny biological nanomachines that can mimic the structure and density of other materials, from viscous fluids to hyperdense solids to superconductors, and anything in between. Martian spacecraft constructed from such materials can shift in shape and structure, providing a sleek and perfectly aerodynamic design without any need for mechanical control surfaces, while clothing composed of the same materials can be flexible, self-repairing, airtight, and bulletproof, if required. The technology also possesses some degree of telepathy, able to adapt to the needs of the user based on thought, rather than physical inputs. Stylistically, Martians often allow such bio-adaptive technologies to adopt a biological appearance as well, mimicking the movement and mechanisms of appropriate living organisms. Such technologies were usually used by the Red Martians, as the Green Martians preferred a more nature-based lifestyle, but related technologies can be seen in use by the Dominators and on Saturn.
Martians are also known to be capable of cold fusion, using it as a power source for their spacecraft. Ancient Martians presumably had hyperspace technology to facilitate their galactic crusade, but while the Yellow Martians may have used this technology to leave the solar system centuries ago, it is not a technology that was in widespread use by other Martian sects at the time of their extinction. Martians were however known to use Zeta Beam technology for interplanetary travel: this was used by the Red Martians to provide access to their colonies, and especially by the Manhunters in pursuit of fugitive criminals.
Mathematics
Historically, the Burning Martians used a form of base eight mathematics as the basis of their technology, derived from their two four-fingered limbs.
The migratory Green Martians had no interest in the Burning Martians or their technology, however, and for practical reasons often chose to present with an extra set of forelimbs. For their mathematics they adopted a base twelve system - allowing for easy division into halves, thirds, and quarters - and utilised only their primary digits (fingers) for counting, reserving their thumbs as a tally of how many times they had counted through their digits (0-4). This allowed Green Martians to easily count from zero to sixty on their fingers. As a result, the numbers four, twelve, and sixty took on significant social meaning, particularly when tracking age: life was divided into cycles of sixty years, and then those cycles were tracked (from 0-12) to provide an upper threshold (780 years) for the lifespan of the otherwise functionally immortal Martians.
Despite adopting a more conventionally humanoid form - presumably in emulation of the Guardians of the Universe - both the Red and Yellow Martians chose to retain a base twelve counting system, though without any of the cultural weight placed upon specific multiples by the Green Martians.
Appendices
- The word Ma'aleca'andra refers to Martians as a species, a nation, and to Mars itself. (Ma'aleca'andra is not (just) a place - it is a people.)
- The Klarmarians (Faceless Hunters) are believed to be descended from Yellow Martians.
- Surviving Martians include J'onn J'onzz (the last Green Martian), M'gann M'orzz (a White Martian), and Jemm (a Saturnian).
- There are many superficial similarities between the Ma'aleca'andra and the various species of Martians in the writings of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Given that the protagonist of those stories is named John, it is possible that J'onn J'onzz may have in some way inspired or informed Burroughs' writing.
