PYRO: Page 3 of 3

Under unexplained circumstances, a man appearing to be Pyro returned in the company of Sauron and Hairbag. The trio were playing poker and discussing the return of mutant bigot William Stryker. Pyro did not seem to take the threat too seriously until a cyborg Stryker burst into the bar and started blasting at the players. The trio turned up later brainwashed by Stryker’s pet telepath Mentallo to act as his personal strike force. He pit Pyro and the others up against an invading team called Weapon X-Force, led by Sabretooth. Pyro failed to take down his target Lady Deathstrike before Mentallo was incapacitated and all of the brainwashing lifted from the captured mutants. Pyro and the others joined Sabretooth to take down Stryker as a form of revenge, which once accomplished led to the dispersing of the mutants back to their former lives. [Weapon X (3rd series) #24-25]

After a majority of the X-Men and their allies disappeared and were presumed dead in a battle with Nate Grey, a new version of the X-Men formed under Cyclops and Wolverine. A new Brotherhood formed to fight against them containing a version of Pyro, once again acting similarly to St. John. This version fought Chamber and was punched in the face by the Juggernaut before his team was defeated. [Uncanny X-Men (4th series) #16]

[Note: Pyro was stated as being one of the very first mutants resurrected using the Krakoan protocols, having been used as a test run. It appears the intention was that Pyro had remained dead ever since he perished from the Legacy virus but perhaps the writers did not know or chose to ignore his handful of recent appearances. This could be explained as either being a different man that shared a name, powerset and many similar personality traits to the original Pyro or that Pyro had survived the Necrosha incident and had been keeping a low profile until resurfacing in the Weapon X title. If the latter, he would have presumably died off panel before his resurrection on Krakoa.]

Sometime later, a new dawn came for all mutants. The island of Krakoa had been converted into a mutant paradise and a joint circuit of five specific mutants, along with a secret stash of memory back-ups and DNA samples, allowed for long dead mutants to be resurrected. As a test, Pyro was chosen to determine if this new resurrection system worked properly. At first, Pyro thought himself special, but later realized he was little more than a lab rat chosen for his lack of importance. Rather than think too critically about this existential moment, Pyro decided he would steal a big boat and get into some trouble. However, he fell asleep on the comfy bed under deck and woke up to Kate Pryde having commandeered the ship for her new Marauders team. Pyro was summarily drafted into the crew, whose goal was to extract mutants from countries where their mutants could not access the teleportation gates to Krakoa. Their first stop was Russia, where Pyro ecstatically controlled Lockheed’s flame to battle soldiers. He clearly was having a blast being on this team. [Marauders (1st series) #1]

Continuing to have fun with the Marauders, Pyro’s enthusiasm went into questionable territory when he went to a tattoo parlor with his captain Kate and came out inked with the top of his face resembling a skull. He thought he was in heaven when he saw the luxury ship that would now serve as the Marauders floating headquarters. His dedication to being as drunk as the pirates of old was taken a bit too far when he started offering beer to mutant children they had rescued from Brazil. [Marauders (1st series) #2-5]

While in Madripoor, the Marauders came under attack by the X-Cutioner and the Hatemonger. X-Cutioner managed to stab Pyro, secretly injecting him with a miniaturized vessel containing an operative with the Yellowjacket guise. Pyro managed to assist his crewmates Bishop and Storm with defeating the invaders but no one was aware of his internal infiltrator. Over the course of several more missions, Yellowjacket gathered valuable intel for Krakoa’s enemies. However, he was eventually discovered by Emma Frost and Pyro was placed in her mindscape, resembling a fantasy party to fool Yellowjacket into thinking Pyro was simply distracted with further debauchery. Yellowjacket saw through this staged play and brought his mini submarine to full size, tearing Pyro to pieces and managing to shoot Emma in the head in her surprise. This was all an illusion within an illusion, though, and Pyro was actually fully conscious and aware of the plan, while Emma fed this narrative into Yellowjacket’s mind. In fact, Pyro insisted that he get to kill the man that had been living inside his body. Given the rule that mutants could kill no man, he was denied this request after puking the sub out. Emma sent the memory wiped Yellowjacket back to his employers, the former Hellfire Club child leaders now called Verendi, and Pyro got some payback by getting to scorch them psychically. [Marauders (1st series) #6-9]

Captain Kate Pryde was recently found to have died and, after numerous attempts at resurrection failed for unknown reasons, a funeral was held for her. The body was set in a boat and lit aflame by Pyro in the style of ancient Vikings. However, shortly after this, Emma Frost recognized the problem with her resurrections and was able to bring Kate back to the land of the living. [Marauders (1st series) #11] Another worldwide incident found the Marauders involved when a Venom foe, Knull the King in Black, invaded Earth with a slew of symbiote monsters. Pyro’s powers were uniquely suited to these foes, as fire was one of their major weaknesses. The Marauders helped rescue a boatful of refugees in no small part thanks to Pyro and his unlikely friend and fellow fire-spurter Lockheed. Pyro even showed some surprising intuition when he called out Bishop for secretly working with X-Force’s Beast on a back-up plan to kill the symbiote-possessed Cyclops and Storm. [King in Black: Marauders #1]

With their captain back and the symbiote incident behind them, the Marauders’ first bit of business included starting a free health clinic dedicated to Moira MacTaggert in the Madripoor slums. Pyro then joined Bishop and Iceman in going to a bar where they responded to the anti-mutant sentiment they received by buying the bar out from under the owner. They were almost immediately attacked by a group of Reavers but the trio of Marauders managed to stave off the attack and retreat to their ship. Verendi turned out to be behind the attack and they soon declared the Marauders outlawed from Madripoor. However, the team refused to abandon the citizens and quickly formed a plan to take back the slums. Pyro teamed up with Iceman as part of “The Two,” to which Iceman remarked that nobody would take the name “Fire and Ice” seriously. Together they managed to create a giant, fire-spewing ice sculpture with a design that seemingly baffled and disgusted their enemies. This giant distraction worked long enough for Kate and the other Marauders to rally the Morlocks into taking back their neighborhood. [Marauders (1st series) #18-19]

Shortly after this, Storm chose to leave the Marauders crew and the team had a nice dinner, reminiscing about her past. Pyro recalled an impressive story about how she managed to rescue a girl by threatening someone with a single knife. He also admitted to losing a bet with her over whether her tenure with the team would outlast his own removal, most likely to the Krakoan prison the Hole. He tried to initiate a new bet over just how many knives Storm had on her person and vastly undercalled the number at three rather than seven. [Marauders (1st series) #20] Storm’s reason for leaving was soon revealed at the mutants big new annual Hellfire Gala. In addition to throwing an extravagant party to celebrate their success and forge new alliances with the humans, they also unveiled their power by using omega level mutants to terraform Mars into a now-mutant populated planet, with Storm as the ambassador. Pyro, for his part, simply enjoyed the alcohol and tempted some of the guests to lose to him at dice gambling. [Hellfire Gala 2021]

The Marauders soon visited the newly christened planet of Arrako, formerly Mars, in their new spaceship, the Mercury. Iceman was quick to ask how Pyro liked the new planet he helped create, and Pyro felt obligated to bring him down a peg. However, the Mercury had been acquired by Emma Frost through unscrupulous means and, after the irate owner had been paid, he betrayed the Marauders and threw them out an airlock into space. Thanks to the quick thinking of Iceman, the team was sealed in a sphere of ice but running out of oxygen and freezing to death. Pyro offered more heat but then they would suffocate faster. Luckily, the team were able to combine their powers in a fashion to rescue themselves and get back aboard the ship to punish their attacker. [Marauders (1st series) #24-25]

Pyro was present at the inception of one of Krakoa’s foremost terrorist when, during a peaceful afternoon on the beach in which he sang to a group of fellow mutants, a sea turtle washed up on shore and died. Nature Girl, a mutant in tune with animals and the earth, lamented harder than the rest over the pointless death caused by human trash lodged in its throat. Despite Pyro’s having burned people alive, even he couldn’t deny the death of an animal affecting him. However, when Nature Girl took revenge too far by killing humans, she was thrown into the Hole for her crimes. She was secretly released by Krakoa through Cypher and snuck off the island by Pyro on the Marauders’ ship, as the trio sympathized with Nature Girl’s mission to help protect the planet. [X-Men Unlimited: X-Men Green #1-2]

The Marauders final business involved financially crippling Verendi. Pyro used his prodigious romance novel-writing skills to supposedly forge a backstory for himself and Bishop, in order to pose as the arms dealers Mister Nobody and The Blade, trying to sell off used S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarriers to the Verendi government. Bishop expressed doubt in this cover but they were able to trick Verendi and secure a payment of eight billion dollars from them in crypto currency. Before they could leave, though, the actual Mister Nobody and Blade arrived. After a failed escape attempt, the pair were forced to fight their way out, Pyro stopping their guns from igniting, and managing to jump to an airship where Kate waited to help even the odds. The Marauders would go through a membership shuffle soon after, with Pyro taking a break to focus further on his best-selling romance novel writing career. [Marauders (1st series) #27]

At the second Hellfire Gala, Pyro reunited with his longtime friend Avalanche, who was on the ballot for membership in the X-Men. Avalanche commiserated with fellow loser of the vote Gorgon, about their disqualification over their shady pasts. [X-Men: Hellfire Gala Confessionals Infinity Comic] Despite not being on the team anymore, after the Marauders returned from a time-traveling adventure in the distant past, Pyro reunited with all members of the crew, past and present, for a celebratory end to their adventures over the last several years. [Marauders (2nd series) #12]