mangles

This is just for references sake, as this is the name this individual xenomorph is referred to by in promotional and marketing material. No character, or indeed Grid herself, refers to her by this name in canon.

Basically our world as it is now, only there are secretly huge alien pyramids hidden on our planet used by an alien race for their badass hunting rituals. They unleash xenomorphs in these and hunt them for sport--if they can't kill them all, they blow up the entire thing to prevent the xenomorphs from spreading all over the globe. Ancient humans worshiped the aliens for some reason and were the willing bait & breeding grounds for the xenomorphs because clearly that was the only entertaining thing to do on a Friday night back in bumfuck BC.

Grid is one of the xenomorphs bred in one of these pyramids, located in the antarctic. Xenomorphs are present in several castes, with their appearances differing depending on what animal they were born from. Grid is one of the warrior caste, born from a human, which means she serves the enormous Queen her mother). Her Queen, along with the pyramid and the rest of her broodmates, have all been destroyed.

Grid differs from the average xenomorph. Learning at an increased rate to her broodmates, Grid is better able to understand and make sense of her surroundings and experiences. Even after repeated encounters with the Predators she survives, and even kills several, while her broodmates are not so fortunate, in due part to the fact she can look at a situation and decide if she'll have the advantage or not. Observational learning, problem solving, and basic reasoning all come to her easily, and make her a dangerous opponent in the field. She knows a Predator can fuck her up bad, while a human makes for much easier prey--unless they're armed, and oh boy does she know that guns = bad. If she realizes she's in a position to be harmed she has no issue with sitting back and letting her broodmates rush ahead, or even with retreating outright. Given the opportunity, and if she's permitted, she's just as happy to hang out in the background and simply observe, learning and observing with an almost childlike curiosity.

Her Queen was the most important thing in her life, being mother, master, and centre of the universe for Grid. Her wants were the wants of the entire colony--except, perhaps, for Grid. Slightly more aware, and just that much more independent, she possess a heightened sense of self-awareness that would have likely caused her to be killed or outcast from the colony had it continued to develop. Instead her colony was blown up, and her mother was chucked into the antarctic ocean to die. Now alone, without the connection of her colony and mother, she has the opportunity to develop more or less as an actual individual.

Grid has no issue killing and consuming other beings, obviously, as she still retains her very strong 'us or them' mentality, and anyone not a xenomorph is very clearly an Other in her eyes. The importance of the colony in her life, firmly hardwired into her skull through generations of evolution, is that only her kind is important, and everyone and everything else is either an obstacle or potential food. That said, she is now more open to explore and interact with these Others in a different capacity, since without a mother, without eggs to guard and the need for brood victims, what need is there for her to kill or abduct every creature she comes across?

Lost without a colony to give her purpose, a sense of egocentrism automatically sets in and her own survival becomes the most important drive. All her actions and judgements are made based on her own wants and needs, and the ability to empathize with others is currently quite beyond her grasp--since anything other than another xenomorph is automatically judged as something less, similar to the way a human might look at a chicken.

Of course, it's probably worth mentioning how her age factors into everything. Given how young she is, Grid has an extremely limited scope of life experiences to draw upon. All she knows is a few frantic hours with her sisters in a cramped pyramid under a fuckton of ice. Everything is shiny and new and strange to her, and likely will be for some time.

Huge, fast, strong, and designed by a guy obsessed with biomechanical genitalia, it shouldn't come as a surprise that xenomorphs are nightmare fuel made flesh.

Roughly twelve feet from drooling jaws to razor tailtip, Grid is no dainty lady. All smooth blueblack exoskeletal armor plates, jagged ridges, and strange natural tubing, she looks like something straight out of--well, a sci-fi horror film. Her armor gives her a natural resistance to caustic substances and impacts, and although a bullet (or knife, if you're feeling desperate) will puncture it fairly easily there's a lovely neon green surprise waiting inside.

Grid bleeds acid--a bright, day-glo green liquid--and it's nasty stuff capable of eating through several inches of steel before contact with the air denatures it and renders it... well, not exactly harmless, but unable to progress through metal. Now just imagine what that'd do to flesh. Speaking of flesh, xenomorphs are predators through and through, and sport the hardware to back this up. Clawed, dexterous fingers, a prehensile bladed tail, and those jaws. One set is bad enough, all vicious silver teeth set front and centre in a slavering maw, but behind that is their 'tongue'--a second set of jaws they can thrust forward with enough force to puncture a Predators metal helm and go through a human skull like it was an egg shell.

With no heat signatures to speak of, xenomorphs are ectotherms to an extreme. While this means Grid can avoid setting off anyones heat sensors, it also means she's sensitive to temperature fluctuations, and has a particular dislike for extreme cold.

She backs this all up with cunning, stealth, and a hunters patience, so essentially she's not something you want to bump into in a dark alley.

As an adult warrior, Grid is roughly 12 feet from tip to tail, with an almost biomechanical appearance and shiny blue-black exoskeleton. Comes with all the standard features, such as acid blood and double jaws, but she sports the addition of a large grid pattern on her head carapace from an encounter with a Predator net.

Sup visual reference!

In this AU Grid possesses a mutation which gives her increased intelligence compared to other xenomorphs of the warrior class, even beyond that which she displays in the film. This increased intelligence will give her the ability to make sense of the speech and language of other species and interpret it accordingly, although she will still lack the ability to produce or mimic these sounds verbally. Basically she'll wind up about as smart as a human, although lacking any empathic capacity beyond that of a small child. There is an increased level of independent thought, which competes with her 'hivemind' mentality and blind loyalty to her Queen. This means she has an increased sense of curiosity and general awareness of her surroundings, and is capable of thoughts beyond 'kill, eat, reproduce.'

This increased intelligence lead to her surviving all of her encounters with the humans and Predators, as well as the destruction of the pyramid. She followed the Queen up to the surface, but then hid during the ensuing conflict and later fled out onto the ice after the Queen was pushed into the sea and killed.

She'd been alive for barely a full day, and although time had meant little to her in the constant duties the mother had dictated for her and her sisters, she was now painfully aware of each ticking second. Everything had changed so quickly.

First ice and snow.

Then silence.

Falling.

Pain.

Strange smells, sounds, strange metals, strange creatures. Uninteresting debris and stink had driven her from the area as soon as she had heat enough to move properly, and then there had been that sound so like the ones the soft meat had made back in the safe warm dark. She'd lashed out, hissed, challenged the noisemaker, but found no opponent waiting to greet her.

And now she was alone.

This was the warmest, darkest corner she could find in the strange landscape, somewhere she could feel relatively secure while she gathered her bearings. No mother. No sisters. A strange, open, bright place. She could smell flesh, true enough, but there was no drive to find it, to capture it, to drag it back to the nest for the next brood. No mother meant there would be no more sisters. No need for brood meat. This open place, full of hiding corners and dark places, also meant there was no need to hunt and kill any potential threat--here she could run, she could hide, there were few corners she could be backed into and hurt. No need to hunt, no need to defend anything but herself.

In her limited time frame of existence, Grid had never felt this complete sense of loss.

Within the next few hours she would begin to experience sensations she was entirely unfamiliar with, such as hunger and exhaustion, which would drive her from her lair to feed. For now, though, she was content to stay hidden and tend to her wounds. The lacerations to her carapace were still there, although no longer bleeding freely, but those had ceased to bother her. Instead she was more interested in the strange addition to her forearm, something metal and unknown that immediately had her full attention as soon as she'd noticed it. She sniffed at it. Scratched at it.

Then she began to chew on it.

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