The North Am Predator was a Yautja hunter who came to Earth in 4001 in Predator vs. Magnus Robot Fighter. He took his name from North Am, the city that covered the North American continent. He survived the loss of his clan's ship on Terra Mining Colony NA-622 in 3999 and later tracked the X-O helmet that Hartwig had taken from its trophy room, killing the general's gun club one by one. Magnus crippled him, and his own clan put him to death.
Biography
Survivor Of NA-622
On April 10, 3999, a band of five Predators fought human marines and their robots at Terra Mining Colony NA-622. One hunter was wounded by a marine whose robot found him cloaked on top of a crate, and he answered with a bladed disc that killed the man. He tore out the marine's skull and spine and held them up, growling that the spoils went to the victor. The marines of Colonel Hartwig found and disabled the hunters' ship at a heavy cost, and they believed they would have lost without the guns of the Manning in orbit above the colony.
Hartwig led his men through the ship's trophy room, which was hung with skulls, among them the long skull of an adult Xenomorph. The collection also held an X-O helmet, taken from the host of a living armor that the clan had killed, and Hartwig carried it off. When his units tried to lift the wreck into orbit with a magnetic lock, it exploded. Hartwig had no doubt that the last surviving hunter had set off its self-destruct, and that Predator walked away from the blast. Hartwig called him one bad boy who had taken the worst the marines could throw and walked away.
Arrival In North Am
Two years later, in June 4001, an intruder ship with no identification approached Earth, and the Northam Space Defense Center sent an interceptor after it. The interceptor brought the alien ship into its docking bay, then turned back toward the city at full speed, stopped answering calls, and crashed in the Lake Ontario sector. Rescuers found the whole crew skinned, and some of the bodies had lost their skulls and backbones. By then the helmet had become the grand trophy of an illegal gun club led by General Hartwig.
The hunter found the helmet at the home of Leeja, a councilmember and the President's daughter, who was probing it with her empathic powers. He crashed through her window, swept aside her servant robot T-4-2 with a warning that harm was coming, and repeated her words back to her in her own voice. Leeja escaped with the helmet to the Goph lev, where Hartwig and his club were waiting to kill Magnus. Hartwig recognized the hunter he had faced on NA-622 and told his companions to settle back and watch. He planned to let it kill Magnus and then use the helmet as bait.
The Predator told Magnus to get a weapon, and Magnus answered that he was a weapon. The hunter tracked him with heat vision, threw him through a wall, hit him with a plasma bolt, and caught him in a net. Before he could finish him, Poochie fired on his back against orders, and the hunter turned to the gun club as more prey. He killed her with his smart disc and threw a spear through Senator Church. When V'ril Trent set her robots on him, he cloaked, destroyed them, and killed her with his shoulder cannon.
The Pursuit Of Hartwig
He left Magnus buried in rubble and Leeja lying still on the ground, treating both as poor sport, and followed Hartwig, who had run with the helmet. He killed one of a gang of Gophs who had stopped the general, threw his lance into the control box of an anti-gravity shaft, and shot down the police flyer PR85 with Leeja aboard. Surrounded by police robots, he adjusted his wrist gauntlet to bend infrared light as well, and the robots lost him. He caught up with Hartwig outside an armory.
Magnus arrived before the hunter could finish the general and kicked him away. He smashed the controls on the Predator's gauntlet, which also governed his cloak and his nuclear self-destruct, knocked off his mask, and tore away the shoulder cannon. Magnus told him that the two of them were the weapons now. The unmasked hunter accepted the fight, but he turned on Hartwig first, called him a thief who had never won the trophy fairly, and killed him with a thrown lance as the general ran.
Blinded And Crippled
Magnus told the Predator that the killing was pointless, and the hunter answered that killing decided who was strong. He slashed Magnus with the wristblades the man had overlooked and beat him badly while Leeja begged him to stop. Magnus broke the blades and then jabbed the hunter in the eyes and blinded him. He taunted the Predator that it was hard to hit what he could not see, and broke his spine with a single blow. The hunter praised Magnus as strong and called it a good fight and good sport, but told him he was not strong enough. Magnus answered that they would now play by his rules.
He told the hunter that he was sorry, that the choice had been to cripple him or kill him, and that killing him would have made him like the Predator and like Hartwig. The hunter was left helpless in the Milespires, the upper levels of the city, with his weapons broken and his face bare. While they fought, North Am space defense had tracked an unidentified craft lifting off from the Lake Ontario site where the interceptor had crashed. The warning was meant for Hartwig, who was already dead, and the craft was coming for the crippled hunter.
Judgement Of The Clan
The craft set down in the Milespires, and a horde of Predators armed with spears came out of it. Magnus told Leeja to run, but the hunters showed no interest in the humans. They gathered around their crippled fellow hunter, and a Predator in a red cape, an elder of the clan, knelt beside him. The North Am Predator told them that the game had reached its end, and his clan drove their spears into him and killed him.
Leeja understood that he had died because he had lost by the rules of his people. She saw that the clan still treated him with more honor in death than North Am gave most of its people while they lived. The hunt that had begun with a stolen trophy on NA-622 ended with the deaths of every member of Hartwig's gun club and of the hunter himself. Only Magnus and Leeja walked away from it.
The Spoils Of The Hunt
Because Magnus had beaten the hunter, the caped elder held out a gold ring marked with an X and told him that the spoils went to the victor. Magnus refused the trophy and threw the ring away, shouting that he was not like them and did not need a trophy. The elder spoke the same words that the fallen hunter had growled over the body of a marine on NA-622 two years before.
Leeja told Magnus that he was not like the Predators, or much like most of the people of North Am either, and that he was something better. Behind them the clan filed back aboard its ship with their spears, leaving the human city with the bodies of Hartwig and his gun club. Magnus, beaten and cut from the fight, let Leeja lead him away to see the medrobs. The ring was the only trophy offered for the death of the North Am Predator, and nobody kept it.
Personality And Traits
The North Am Predator followed a strict code. He guarded the trophies of his hunts, and he crossed space to take back a helmet that Hartwig had stolen rather than won. He would not hunt the helpless or the unworthy, so he spared Leeja when she played dead and left Magnus where he lay buried. He enjoyed toying with his prey, repeated Leeja's words in her own voice, and offered Magnus the chance to arm himself before their first fight.
He punished anyone who broke the terms of a fair hunt. Poochie died the moment she fired on his back, and Hartwig was killed as a thief before the hunter would face Magnus as an equal. He believed that killing decided who was strong, and he kept fighting after losing his mask, his cannon, and the controls of his gauntlet. When Magnus crippled him, he accepted his defeat and the death his clan gave him.
Weapons And Equipment
He carried a returning disc, a spear that he threw through Senator Church and later through Hartwig, a net, and a shoulder cannon that fired plasma bolts and followed his sight. His wrist gauntlet controlled a light-bending cloak and a low-yield nuclear self-destruct, and he adjusted it in North Am to hide from infrared sensors as well. Clawed wristblades stayed hidden until the fight with Magnus, his mask gave him heat vision, and he wore a necklace of vertebrae over armor plates and mesh. Magnus disabled the gauntlet, tore away the cannon, knocked off the mask, and broke the blades before crippling him.
Behind The Scenes
The hunter appeared in Predator vs. Magnus Robot Fighter, plotted by Jim Shooter, scripted by John Ostrander, and drawn by Lee Weeks. Dark Horse Comics and Valiant published it in two issues from November 1992 to May 1993. None of the Predators was named in the comic, so the name North Am Predator comes from its setting. North Am was the city that covered North America in the Magnus, Robot Fighter comics, which Gold Key began in the 1960s and Valiant revived in 1991.
The first issue tied the hunter to NA-622 through Hartwig, who saw the survivor walk away from the blast in 3999 and recognized him in 4001. The comic mostly lettered the city as Northam, as in the Northam Space Defense Center, although Leeja called the clan's craft something other than a North Am ship. Set in 4001, his hunt is the furthest point in the Predator timeline. The Dark Horse solicitation called the trophy the X-O Manowar helmet, after Valiant's series about a living alien armor, although the comic itself only called it an X-O.
Appearances
- Predator vs. Magnus Robot Fighter #1-2 (Dark Horse and Valiant, 1992-1993)
- Predator vs. Magnus Robot Fighter trade paperback (Dark Horse, 1994)
Tag Categories: Individual Predators | Predators From The Comics | Predator Deaths | Predator Lore
