WIDGET

 

WIDGET

Real Name: Widget

First Appearance: Excalibur (Vol. 1) #1, October 1988

Powers: Widget is an entity that was created out of a Sentinel temporal monitor unit interfacing with the mutagenic aura and phasing power of Earth-811's Kitty (Kate) Pryde. The resulting discharge of her power scrambled the unit and cast her mind backwards in time, where it ended up as a highly active energy matrix possessing a small ball of scrap to create "Widget". Technically, Widget's unique physiology is held together by a fluctuating hyperwave pulse in an eccentric magnetic field (basically, magnetism being beamed in from another dimensional plane). This event scattered Kate's consciousness across the multi-dimensional planes she could now recognize due to bonding with the unit, leaving only the most primitive of minds to guide Widget: One totally unaware of its past identity and originally capable only of mimicking the speech of others.

Widget is capable of consuming metal and presumably other substances, crunching them up and digesting them into excess mass. It can then reconfigure this excess mass into new shapes and forms, such as assimilating the mass of an old, junked racing car and growing a new and functional car out of the old materials. On a single occasion, Widget also demonstrated the ability to convert its stored mass into fuel for an offensive energy discharge. Primarily, however, Widget grows an inter-dimensional gateway from itself, an oval portal about 7 feet tall with its standard "head" form marking the top. These portals can lead virtually anywhere in the multiverse, and generally open to completely random locations. Once it’s done with the portal (or any other expansion of itself, for that matter), Widget detaches its floating head from the mass and proceeds accordingly, leaving the portal or other construction inert. The portals are more practical, but Widget can generate a cross-time pulse that automatically encompasses all in its general area when fed a sufficiently powerful energy source, such as the Phoenix Force. Widget could perform these transportations because its nascent consciousness naturally perceived the infinity of multi-dimensional space, until the being Bert placed a cross-time negator device within Widget, preventing it from opening extra-dimensional portals, and grounding its consciousness in one perspective space-time again.

This grounding gave Kate's consciousness a chance to slowly re-emerge within the Widget body. Widget became more focused and began attempting to grow a humanoid body to go with its head: Consuming raw materials, producing a mechanical body, then detaching and trying again, becoming more skilled at the construction each time. Eventually, Widget evolved into a new form composed of cold metal only on its fingertips, shoulder and neck components, and radically reshaped head: The rest of Widget's body was a human-shaped temporal distortion, displacing air yet possessing no mass. Widget could now teleport through time and space virtually at will.