WARNING: The following contains spoilers for X-Force #6, by Benjamin Percy, Stephen Segovia, Guru-eFX and VC’s Joe Caramagna, on sale now.
Outsides of the garden Storm used to keep in the X-Mansion, plants haven’t usually been a big part of the X-Men’s day-to-day life. However, that’s changed in a major way since the team relocated on the living island Krakoa, along with the rest of Marvel’s mutants in last year’s House of X.
Thanks to Krakoa’s numerous miracle drugs, the mutant nation became a world power overnight. With Krakoa providing the basis for all kinds of organic biotechnology, plant life has quickly taken on a surprisingly central role in the lives of Marvel’s mutants.
However, X-Force #5 reveals that plants may also be one of the single greatest threats to mutantkind in the form of telefloronics.
In this issue, X-Force encounters several plant-based attackers while Charles Xavier tries to establish formal diplomatic relations between Krakoa and Terra Verde. With their vines, shapeshifting capabilities and sharp tendrils, they threaten the fictional nation’s president and seemingly capture his son, Hadwin Cocom.
Although they might not seem like an existential threat to mutants, Beast later says that the telefloronic technology poses as much of a threat as the Sentinels.
As a data page in the issue reveals, Terra Verde was on the verge of becoming the world leader in telefloronics, a kind of organic nanotechnology built around microbes and fungi instead of extremely small machines. Although telefloronics showed early promise in advancing medicine, international interest and investments in the tech evaporated when Xavier brought Krakoa’s seeds to the world stage.
The telefloronic attackers in this issue were primarily researchers who were taken over by “a hostile botanical intelligence” that sprouted out of their work.
In the same way that modern Omega Sentinels paved the way for future mutant-killing machines like Nimrod, Beast believes that telefloronics could create an alternate route to the kind of doomed futures that were depicted in Powers of X.
Although Beast and the rest of X-Force seemingly destroy all of the telefloronic warriors and the research that created them, the technology lives on in Cocom, who was secretly telefloronic all along.
While this issue ends with the telefloronic Cocom walking off into the unknown, the X-Men have also recently had to contend with some other surprisingly effective plant-based villains: Hordeculture.
That four-person team of agricultural scientists tried to use their botanical expertise to take control of the world’s food supply as part of a plant to greatly reduce the Earth’s population. After they took down an imposing mutant squad in X-Men #3, they retreated, stating that they wanted to control or kill Krakoa.
Long before the mutants made their home on the sentient island, Krakoa was responsible for capturing one generation of X-Men and wiping out another. Even though they eventually found common ground with Krakoa, it doesn’t seem like peace will blossom between the mutants and Hordeculture or Cocom any time soon. Unfortunately for the X-Men, it might not be long before those bad seeds take root and grow into truly dangerous threats.