Editing NX PC03 (section)

==Background==

In many ways, Marko "Mark" Mandl's story is actually the story of his mother, Dr. Eva Mandl. Or, as the world knows her now, Mitochondria, the Cell Queen. Originally she was known as one of the first superheroes before TITAN, as she seemed one of the only people who saw the kaiju coming, and outlined several important standard procedures in evacuation and analysis. Unfortunately, as people would later discover, she also felt humanity deserved the kaiju on some level - an anarchist and environmentalist both, her writings grew increasingly misanthropic and distrustful of her supposed friends in the government, even beginning to show a growing envy of the simple motives of kaiju, and increasing dismay at the infighting between her team and superiors. At one point, after something known as "the Kīlauea Incident", heavily classified, she apparently lost faith in humanity's survival altogether and vanished with her son - and several samples of kaiju blood from a creature described as "a great amoeba."



Marko doesn't know what happened between the year he vanished and was impromptu dumped at the prototype council that would later become Gilgamesh with a note on how to take care of him and his new requirements as a "new race of man." What is known is that shortly thereafter, the renamed Mitochondria revealed herself and announced she was in full revolt against the governments of the world as "poor stewards of human evolution" and that she was engineering a new species of mankind to survive a world that no longer had a place for Homo sapiens, starting with herself - as shown by how she, like her son, had become a humanoid protist. She has since become one of the world's supervillains - but the authorities are slow to arrest her, as she also provides order and medical care to her base in the destroyed remnants of Hamberg and still shows up to help fight the kaiju, often with her engineered beasts. As for her son - well, on some level he pathologically acts human to confirm that he isn't a kaiju hybrid, even though like his mother he can easily birth smaller beasts from his back. He has the kindness she seems to have forgotten in the face of her increasingly insane dreams, but above all else, he wants to know why she went from a heroine to a monster queen - and if that is fated to happen to him.