Scorpio (Prime Earth)

Scorpio
Gallery
Official Team Name	Scorpio
Status	Active
Alignment	Bad
Universe	Prime Earth
Base of Operations	Earth's Moon, formerly Cook Strait
Affiliations
Team Leader(s)	Kordax (former)
Current Members	General Anderton; Greene; Marsh; Niles; Simone Sanchez
Former Members	Kordax; Romero (deceased)
Enemies	Aquaman; Green Arrow
Creators	Bill Finger · Bob Brown
First appearance	Aquaman Giant #1 (December, 2019)

Scorpio is a terrorist group dedicated to the downfall of Aquaman and domination of the world.

History

Stinging Tide

Following his defeat, Kordax acquired control of Scorpio by killing their leader and hatched a plan to use them to ensure Arthur's downfall as well as disgrace. They first trapped a holy idol of the Lurkers with Trench pheromones. When the Lurker king Noble attempted to retrieve it with an Atlantean archaeological team, they were attacked by the Trench which caused Aquaman, Mera and the Sea Devils to come to his rescue although they had to go through a very hard fight.

Now that Arthur knew Scorpio was behind the attack on Noble, Kordax had a Scorpio facility in Antarctica uncloaked for the queen Nuada Silverhand to discover. Arthur and the Sea Devils upon investigating the facility trigger a fail safe which activates the destructive machine giant robot called Torpedoman who goes after pure-blood Atlanteans. It's barely stopped in time but the hard-fought victories shake the faith of the Atlanteans and others in Arthur's ability to rule.

After Scorpio starts a pirate broadcast to discredit Aquaman, the Sea Devils and Tula discover their base and find that Scorpio has hundreds of soldiers and Kordax who is officially called "Number One" in the group, leads them. Tula and the Devils are defeated but they broadcast an SOS to Aquaman who reaches there before he can kill them. Aquaman fights Kordax while Tula and the Sea Devils take care of the Scorpio members. After Kordax is lobotomized, the rest of Scorpio members surrender and Aquaman decides to rebuild the Aquarium Prison they used as a base, as a jail for them.

Scorpio would later kidnap Dr. Sinclar, the world's leading expert in both Atlantean and human DNA studies, along with his S.T.A.R. Labs team. They attacked Aquaman and he pretended to be killed by their plasma darts, to gain entrance to the facility they were holding him and learn their plan. There, he found out that they were planning to have Sinclair make more hybrids like him to serve as their soldiers and conquer the world. After revealing himself to be still alive, he subdued all the Scorpio soldiers and rescued Dr. Sinclair.

Deep Target

Scorpio later began experimenting with time travel. They used the technology to amass vast power and wealth and were careful to only make minor changes to the world's history. However they somehow caused ancient Atlanteans to be brought into the present and appear within the city, drawing Aquaman's attention. Atlantean scientists detected a distinctive tachyon signature where the strangers had appeared and Aquaman matched them to similar readings the Justice League had detected from a small building in Star City where Scorpio kept one of their time platforms. Meanwhile, a construction worker named Alex Santos was killed in an accident working after hours on a building site in Seattle being developed by one of Scorpio's front companies. Green Arrow wanted to bring the people responsible for Alex's death to justice and so broke into the CEO's office and demanded to know who had ordered the workers to work in dangerous conditions to meet deadlines. His investigation brought him to the same building in Star City. The two heroes independently broke into the building and met while fighting off Scorpio henchmen and stumbled across the time platform chamber.

During an early test of the time travel technology, the project leader General Anderton had been fused with a dinosaur when it wandered into the platform's beam, so when the two heroes enterred the chamber, Scorpio scientists decided it would be interesting to try to fuse them together. They lured the heroes onto the time platform with holographic hostages, but when they activated it Aquaman attempted to tackle Green Arrow off the platform while at the same time Arrow shot out the platform's main time travel projector. The resulting accident somehow caused the two men to switch lives, which only they and Scorpio were aware of.

"Arthur Queen", the Green Arrow, reached out to "Oliver Curry", aka Aquaman, and the two agreed to work together to find out what had happened. Scorpio agents embedded within Queen Enterprises informed General Anderton of what was happening and diverted the pair to an island which Scorpio owned. General Anderton captured them and took them to Scorpio's base on the Moon, hoping to find out how they had first gotten on Scorpio's trail, but they managed to escape the interrogation chamber. To prevent the heroes returning to Earth and alerting the Justice League, General Anderton actived the "Tabula Rasa protocol". This was a last resort to ensure Scorpio gained total control over the world by sending operatives and equipment into the preshistoric past at fixed points marked by devices called "time stamps", allowing them to guide history from the very beginning. Safeguards intended to ensure that operatives landed safely failed and many were killed instantly, the few survivors were fused with dinosaurs in the same way General Anderton was. This altered the timeline to such an extent that dinosaurs survived into the 21st Century and sentient, humanoid dinosaurs were Earth's dominant life form.

Anderton, Oliver and Arthur were the only people unaffected by the changes of the timeline. The three of them constructed a new time machine and were able to travel to Scorpio's first ever time travel experiment, which had the side effect of returning Aquaman and Green Arrow to normal. They were able to destroy Scorpio's time travel project before it could begin, however changes to the timeline remained, most significantly that the Ocean Master was now Aquaman's ally and co-ruler of Atlantis. It was revealed that Scorpio had been performing other time travel experiments which most of their agents were not aware of, even the Andertons had had their memories of them blocked so that they could not be extracted by a telepath. This allowed Scorpio to maintain control of the timeline.

A Scorpio agent posing as the younger General Anderton's lawyer visited him in prison and provided him with drugs that gave him super-strength and unlocked his memories. They murdered the other prisoners and escaped, but the alternate General Anderton managed to get away when they tried to kill him. As Aquaman and Green Arrow had foiled Scorpio's plans in multiple timelines, Scorpio scientists determined a way to kill them across all timelines, but to do so they would need the originals, or at least their dead bodies.

Scorpio knew that eventually the heroes would attack their moonbase again, so they laid a trap for them by filling them time travel laboratory with dinosaurs and placing Anderton as a first line of defense. As expected, Aquaman, Green Arrow and the alternate Anderton attacked the moon. Anderton fought Aquaman while his counterpart and Green Arrow went to the laboratory. Green Arrow and the alternate Anderton built three "time bands" which would allow them to be unaffected by changes to the timeline, and fended off the dinosaurs long enough for Anderton to escape through the time portal to the site of Scorpio's first "time stamp". Anderton deactivated the entire time travel network, preventing Scorpio from ever developing time travel and restoring the timeline to normal.

Notes

• Scorpio was created by Bill Finger and Bob Brown, first appearing in Challengers of the Unknown #51. However, in the Prime Earth continuity, Scorpio first appeared as part of the New 52 DC Universe in Aquaman Giant #1 by Steve Orlando and Daniel Sampere.

See Also

• 11 Appearances of Scorpio (Prime Earth)
• 1 Images that include Scorpio (Prime Earth)
• Team Gallery: Scorpio (Prime Earth)

Links and References

Footnotes

Aquaman Villain(s) This character, team or organization, is or was primarily an enemy of Aquaman, or members of the Aquaman Family. This template will categorize articles that include it into the category "Aquaman Villains."

Green Arrow Villain(s) This character is or was primarily an enemy of Green Arrow, or his supporting cast including Black Canary and Team Arrow. This template will categorize articles that include it into the category "Green Arrow Villains."