Doom Box

This article is about the gadget. You may be looking for Doom Box (Disambiguation).

"My friends and I believed we were better suited to rule this world than those in power. The box was intended as a way of eliminating those who stood in our way. Put in the proper places and activated remotely, it would effectively make anyone or anything we didn't like disappear. But there was a flaw in its construction. It couldn't be shut off. Used even once, it would leave nothing of our galaxy. That is why we must destroy it."
― Arctur, The Doom Box

Parent Page: Technology

Doom Box
Gadget
User(s) Core Hunter Functionality Contracting spatial fields Status Deactivated

The Doom Box was a galactic superweapon created with a critical flaw that allowed it to never be turned off. After its energies were transferred to Core Hunter's Hero Core Remover Tool, the Doom box was rendered harmless, and is now stored in the Hero Factory.

History

Five thousand years ago, the box was created by a group of four reptilian-faced robotic villains, including Arctur and Deneb, in an underground complex's central chamber in their planet. The creators used a well of flame to make the box and used pairs of tongs to put it on a stone pedestal. They created the box because they wanted to rule their world, and the box was intended to be used as a way of destroying their enemies who got in their way. However, upon the finalization of the box, it was discovered by Arctur, the leader of the group of villains, that it could not be turned off, and was effectively a galactic doomsday weapon. So, Arctur refused to use the Doom Box, causing Deneb to protest as he had given everything to make the weapon they now would not even use. Arctur explained why he refused, and then used a glowing axe that radiated energy to break the Doom Box into three fragments. He told his comrades about which farthest planets of the galaxy will the pieces be hidden, so no one will ever find them, so the galaxy will be safe from the box. Arctur and his comrades hid the pieces in these planets. However, Deneb secretly recorded their locations on a star chart on a stone wall. He marked the locations with the symbol of a square. The map looked like scratches of a child.

A thousand years ago, treasure hunters rediscovered the chamber. They were disappointed by it and did not understand the map at first, but one of them noticed the map's true nature, so the treasure hunters used lasers to cut the map out of the wall and took it away, despite not knowing where the map leads to. The Doom Box's creators fought the thieves on many worlds, trying to get the map back, and the thieves lost most of the fights.

Seven years ago, the thieves became desperate to save themselves from the creators, so they traded it to a crooked trader named Speeda Demon for a fast ship. Speeda Demon saw the map as valuable, but he did not want to get attention from the Hero Factory, who he believed would arrest for possessing a stolen artifact, and wanted to save himself from the creators, so he sold it fast to a criminal named Core Hunter, who used it to recover the Doom Box fragments to make the threat of him using the weapon to make himself the ruler of the galaxy. The creators never found the map since.

Core Hunter's Search for the Doom Box pieces

On the first location, one of the pieces was hidden in a vault in a planet in the Omega system, and the vault was guarded specifically against intruders. Core Hunter had someone disassemble him and waited until he was eventually taken inside the vault from the crate he was hiding in. Once inside, Core Hunter rebuilt himself, stole the fragment, and escaped, hiding it in a mine on the same planet.

The villain did simple robbery and raided a string of mansions in a resort world a light-year away from an unnamed criminal desert planet. He retrieved the second Doom Box fragment that way. Core Hunter gave it to his duplicate, who he sent to the unnamed criminal desert world. He had his duplicate let Geb hide the box fragment in a vault in Geb's refueling station on the planet.

After getting the third piece from an unknown planet, Core Hunter went to hide it on an old cargo freighter in space. The villain stole Stringer's Drop Ship, but there was a homing beacon on it, and it was piloted remotely by the Hero Factory organization right to Makuhero City, where Core Hunter was caught and put in prison.

Breakout

During the mass breakout orchestrated by the villains, Black Phantom and Voltix, Core Hunter was one of the many villains to escape imprisonment.^{[Episode 8]} He then began his operation to retrieve the three fragments of the Doom Box. First, he went to Geb, only to find that Bulk and Natalie Breez were already there to get the first Doom Box fragment. Core Hunter used an anti-gravity device to send Geb into orbit and then another to retrieve the fragment. Bulk fired his Missile Launcher at Core Hunter, but Arctur saved Core Hunter and told him that the Alpha 1 Team was after the second fragment located at the mine.

Core Hunter rushed off to the mine and retrieved the second fragment, putting down a thick layer of artificial dust to cover his tracks and to lead the Alpha 1 Team to a trap where the Heroes would get destroyed by Duradium in the mine, but when Preston Stormer and William Furno were in the mine, they survived by getting out of the mine in time.

Finally, Core Hunter went to the freighter containing the third fragment, which was junked in a ship graveyard. He hired a band of mercenaries and four robots that are programmed to detect movement to defend against the Alpha 1 Team. In the cargo bay, Core Hunter assembled two of the fragments, intending to use the threat of reforming the whole device to create a galactic ransom situation. Bulk, Stormer, Furno, Jimi Stringer, and Mark Surge defeated Core Hunter's henchmen and Breez disabled Core Hunter's ship. In a standoff with Alpha 1, Core Hunter was attacked by Surge, who utilized his Electricity Shooter on him, giving Core Hunter spasms that caused him to accidentally reform the Doom Box. Everyone was surpised to see the Doom Box not activated. However, Arctur appeared and offered to take Core Hunter to where the Doom Box was forged, the only place it could actually be activated. Core Hunter accepted, and was teleported there by Arctur, but he was delayed by being in a spot far from the one where the Doom Box was created because Arctur actually wanted to disable the Doom Box, so he helped the Alpha 1 Team.

Core Hunter eventually found the Doom Box's birthplace, but then came to a confrontation with Alpha 1 Team and Daniel Rocka instead. After Stormer, with the help of the other Heroes, goaded the villain into activating the Doom Box, Core Hunter used his Plasma Shooter to try to kill Stormer, but Arctur got in the way to save Stormer, getting fatally wounded. Core Hunter reassembled the Doom Box, activating it, but shortly after this, Breez used the Hero Core Remover Tool to absorb the Doom Box's energies and render it harmless, as told by Arctur, inadvertently supercharging the weapon. Core Hunter used his tool to incapacitate the Heroes, except for Surge, who he attempted to offer a position in his new empire. Surge declined and instead fired his shooter at Core Hunter, which caused the villain's powers to fold in on himself, until his body vanished.

The Doom Box was placed in the Hero Factory building.^[SM1]

Somehow, Core Hunter survived his ordeal and resumed his criminal activities, with his Doom Box powers gone.^[FO:MSG]

Functionality

On the surface, the Doom Box is a nondescript black metal box, as it looks like a block of iron. It is one foot by two feet, and made of simple, unadorned black metal. It has no lib, handle, or any other way to open it. It does not have a lock. When Arctur used his axe to slice the box into three pieces, every time he sliced created a blinding flash, and the axe spent its energy doing the slicing. According to Stormer, the box cannot be destroyed easily, not even by Duradium or an exploded power plant in the planet in the Omega system.

When activated by being reassembled in its birthplace, the Doom Box would glow, float in mid-air, become transparent, and slowly expand. It would solidify over and absorb whatever it expanded around. It then would shrink back to its original size, obliterating whatever was inside it. It was intended to be used to take out enemies of its makers, with a remote activation, but there was a flaw in the Doom Box's construction; it was unable to be shut off. If activated, the box would continue to grow until it reached the ends of the entire galaxy, and destroy everything inside. Its energies were green.

After its energies were transferred to the Hero Core Remover Tool while the Doom Box was just activated, the Doom Box shrank back to its normal size and released its hold on whatever it absorbed, namely Core Hunter since he was the only physical thing that it touched. The absorption rendered the Doom Box harmless. However, the absorption made the Tool glow green, as the Tool was supercharged with the energy. Core Hunter felt the energy, and he believed that the energy gave him so much power that he could tear a galaxy apart. The Tool could shoot an emerald green bolt of energy that could disintegrate the underground complex's four stone walls, as it could destroy two solid miles of the complex. The Tool could also absorb Heroes' energy over the distance. When Core Hunter fired an energy beam at Surge and then Surge shot a blast of high-voltage electricity to redirect the Doom Box blast at Core Hunter, Core Hunter absorbed the blast, but this caused the Doom Box's power to overload and hurt Core Hunter. The Doom Box's energies radiated from Core Hunter. Surge theorized that Stormer or Stringer could help Core Hunter with his condition. Core Hunter's voice sounded fainter. The energies became very bright. They caused Core Hunter to fold in on himself and disappear. Stormer could not find Core Hunter, not even with Professor Nathaniel Zib's help.^[SM1] Somehow, Core Hunter survived the ordeal and lost the Doom Box's energies when he returned to cause crimes.^[FO:MSG]

Appearances

• Secret Mission 1: The Doom Box (FA)
• Face Off: Makuro's Secret Guidebook (M)