While X-Men.
Long ago, when Scott and Alex Summers were just children, the X-Men villain Apocalypse, along with the insidious service of Mr. Sinister, stole Alex’s DNA in the hope of using it to resurrect an entity Apocalypse was charged with looking after. Ahmet Abdol (aka the Living Pharaoh) had Alex’s DNA grafted to him by Apocalypse and Sinister to heighten the power level of the Pharaoh’s reincarnated vessel. However, rather than simply gaining a fraction of Alex Summers’ mutant abilities, the Living Pharaoh became linked to Havok, which put a target on the X-Man’s back years later. When he became an adult, Havok was abducted by a member of the Cult of the Living Pharaoh named Leila O’Toole, and when Havok attempted to fight her off before the cult had its way with him, she became more and more empowered with every attack he threw. After that encounter, Leila harnessed the power she siphoned from Havok, just as her idol had done so many years earlier, and became the villain Plasma.
In Marc Spector: Moon Knight #25 by Howard Mackie and Mark Bagley, Moon Knight is thrown head first into a battle with a terrorist organization known as Knights of the Moon who commit atrocities in the name of the same god Moon Knight himself serves, Khonshu. However, the Knights of the Moon are secretly run by the Cult of the Living Pharaoh, and Plasma is their acting leader. In this issue, Moon Knight partners with Ghost Rider to take the terrorists down, but Plasma is able to fend off the Spirit of Vengeance with her surprisingly powerful abilities. Plasma completely obliterates Ghost Rider with a single attack, killing him for a brief moment before he is able to rise again from what was left of his vaporized corpse.
Anyone strong enough to literally kill Ghost Rider, even for a short period, should be considered an incredibly formidable threat, and this one had only the X-Men to thank for her power. While it was Apocalypse and Sinister who started the process by linking Havok with the Living Pharaoh against his will, putting him in the crosshairs of the Cult of the Living Pharaoh to begin with, it is only because of the X-Men’s continued involvement and Alex’s flippant nature towards the true danger he was in that created this monster who Moon Knight later had to deal with.
While Moon Knight was successful in killing Plasma by the end of this issue, she proved to be a dangerous villain in more ways than one. Aside from her obviously high power level, Plasma organized a terrorist organization that not only pushed Moon Knight to the limits of his strength, but also tested his resolve as they made him question his own identity as the Fist of Khonshu. While completely inadvertent with the real culprits being two of their worst enemies, the X-Men were directly responsible for creating one of Moon Knight’s most powerful villains.
