M408--Nimrod

Nimrod

First Appearance: The Uncanny X-Men #191 (March 1985)

In the Sentinel controlled future, an aged Katherine Pryde’s plan to send some of her mutants through time in an effort to undo their reality was a desperate one, because she knew her people were being hunted by the Master Mold’s favorite son.  Nimrod was his name, and he was less a machine than a synthetic angel of death.  The resources Master Mold used to craft him were so immense that just one Nimrod was capable of existing on Earth at a time, but one was enough.  He had used his built in mutant power nullification capabilities to expunge the Phoenix from their planet entirely.  With mutantkind’s greatest protective force gone, nothing could stop him from wiping them out once and for all.

But Nimrod was not a soulless computer program.  Master Mold had imbued him with thought, reasoning, and feelings, to better understand the species the Sentinels had been designed to destroy.  He did not hate mutants, but killing them was all he was capable of.  Only when every last mutant on Earth had been vanquished would he finally be free of his ceaseless war.  Nimrod thought he was finally within reach of his goal when he murdered Pryde and the rest of her remaining cadre, until he discovered the stitches in time they left behind.  Stepping through one, he found himself in the distant past when the mutants were at their peak, on a living island where they could never truly die.  Thus did Nimrod’s endless efforts to rid himself of mutants begin once more.

----

Basically, he ended up going through one of the time portals that Bishop/Rachel Summers/Layla Miller went through but ended up many, many years after them when the mutants are now living on Krakoa.

Nimrod is a favorite X-Men villain of mine. I like this concept of the uber Sentinel, a machine so sophisticated that he basically wraps around to being human again. So there is this kind of vaguely sympathetic angle to him--he doesn't want to kill mutants, but it's all he *can* do--until they are all gone, he literally can't stop. And unfortunately he got too curious for his own good and ended up in the main timeline when Krakoa has become the mutants' new home (as a reference to him being one of the main villains of the Krakoan era in the comics). For reference, this Krakoan era is pretty far into my timeline, sometime around the Secret Wars era, so this is the furthest in the timeline I've gotten to the X-Men and their status quo. You could see Nimrod as their final boss of sorts.

Quite a few characters have come from my Days of Future Past timeline. To help you along--Layla Miller arrived to the earliest point in time, over a decade before the others. Bishop arrived some time after Cable arrived and started X-Force, with Rachel Summers arriving a little while after that, following the destruction of Apocalypse at the Dark Phoenix's hand. And then Nimrod many, many years later in the Krakoan age.

For his design--I originally went for something more overtly robotic looking, but I just couldn't get Nimrod the Lesser's terrific design from Powers of X and I scrapped it and started over with something more "organic" looking. Like Sentinels of his time have become so advanced that they barely look like robots anymore. I also wanted him to kind of look like a messiah of sorts. Like this descending angel come to administer judgement.