Broad-shouldered and tall, a powerful bipedal frame under a thick coat of azure fur and a wild mane of indigo hair. A strong jaw and ready smile flash the tips of bestial teeth; his hands and big prehensile feet are capped in carefully manicured claws. Eyes bright and analytical, quick to sparkle with good humor.

IV: The Beast Henry McCoy was born in Dunfee, Illinois, son of Norton and Edna McCoy. While working at the nuclear plant, Norton was exposed to massive amounts of radiation which, although they did not affect him, caused his son not only to be born a mutant but exhibit signs of mutation from birth. Hank had unusually large hands and feet and superior strength and agility, making him a physical specimen without equal among his peers, and unbeknownst to him was possessed of a volatile X-Gene extremely rare even among his kind. Despite these gifts, however, it would be his intellect that would define Hank, his most cherished and known characteristic despite his physical anomalies and the cornerstone of the man he would become. In no time the hyperactive boy became a star football player at Bard College and earned the nickname The Beast. The young man's life seemed on the right track for great things, until the whispers of a new budding species reached Dunfee. Slowly, but surely, his neighbors, teachers and friends started to look at Hank differently, suddenly aware that their beloved boy might be one of them. Almost overnight Hank lost everything, and the town became almost dangerous for him, for where once he had been adored by all, he became a reviled for the contents of his genes. Despite it all, however, Hank did not hide and instead held his head high, unwilling to give bigots what they so obviously wanted. When news of these scandals hit the airwaves they drew the attention of Professor Charles Xavier, who offered Hank and his family the chance to bring the boy into his prestigious Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters in Westchester. Seeing no future for him in Dunfee, his parents accepted without realizing Hank was going to, beyond receiving an amazing education, learn and develop his latent potential as a mutant, to become Beast, one of the secretive X-Men! V: Formative Years Under Professor X's tutelage, Hank's days were filled with differential equations, puzzle-solving, engineering, tinkering and Danger Room workouts, and despite the workload Hank thrived in ways that none of his friends could match. Completely unashamed of his powers, and possessed of his next-level intelligence, Hank was jovial and charismatic, a perfect counterbalance to Alex's rebeliousness, Scott's austerity or Warren's brooding. Soon the man had made friends with them all, though Bobby's vivacity, Jean's congeniality and Lorna's wickedness were closer to his heart. With the X-Men Hank fought the Juggernaut in their maiden voyage and flew to Cape Citadel to do battle with Magneto, proving himself to be very efficient as the group's muscle. Whenever he was needed, Hank was there proving himself to be reliable and while the team was often in dangerous situations their mutations put them in a position to succeed. Despite his worries about their age and the danger of the situations they found themselves at, truth was that Hank had the time of his life and he very much enjoyed the heroics, until the team was trapped by Krakoa. After that moment, the young man decided that playtime was over, and along with the others, minus Scott, he left the X-Men to pursuea career elsewhere. Krakoa had touched a primitive part of Hank that made him worry for himself. He had dreams about he island for weeks after leaving, yearning to return, to run free in that wilderness, and it scared him to no end. VI: Science Without Humanity Hank's accolades were no small feat for a young man his age, and soon he found himself employed by Oscorp under Dr. Curtis Connors, a good friend of Professor Xavier more than willing to give the brilliant boy a shot. Dr. Connors' research involved the X-Gene, and it allowed Hank to learn much about its permutations and secrets. Whereas Dr. Connors was secretly invested in regrowing his lost arm by unlocking the power of the mutant gene, Hank was more interested in understanding the homo superior genome, and how that could be used to better the life of mutants. More selfishly, Hank also very much wanted to better understand himself and his developing mutation. The end result of their research was the basis for what became, years later, the incredibly powerful Mutant Growth Hormone. The solution was untested, however, and the demanding deadlines of the corporaion, coupled with Dr. Connors's growing obsession and diminished funding ended in Hank arriving to work one night to find his mentor convulsing on the floor. Although he tried to help the man, Hank soon realized he had taken a strain of their serum, one he believed could bring his arm back. Before Hank's eyes the compassionate and intelligent Connors was transformed into a deadly creature, a monster the newspapers would call The Lizard some time later. As the creature began its rampage, Hank saw no way to leave the building until the other scientists and personel had also vacated the premises. In the battle, which took to the rooftops, Hank ended up bitten by the monster, the reaction of the Lizard's toxins and his own X-Gene furthering Hank's own evolution. As he grew blue fur, claws and became magnitudes stronger and faster than he had been before, Beast managed to finally defeat Lizard without killing him. Horrified by his appearance, however, he left, and remained in hiding until, months later, he saw the Dark Phoenix erupt into the skies of Central Park and fly off-world. Investigating the scene, he found his old friends, his family, and rejoined the X-Men, putting aside his own gripes with his new appearance to help them with getting Jean back. It was him who devised the contraption that momentarily locked the Phoenix Force within Jean for Professor X to subdue, and he fought against the Shi'ar in the trial by combat along with the other X-Men, to no avail. In the end, along with the others, he watched as Jean was depowered and seeing how it changed his good friend after the fact, Hank gained new appreciation for his mutation. Now with the X-Men, they had work to do and Beast was there to do it. VII: Uncivilized Times The activation of Project Wideawake did not come as a surprise for Hank, but it still felt like a momentous, and wrongful, step towards a world he had hoped bright minds could have avoided. A man of science and reason, he had a hard time understanding the violence to which both mutants and humans were resorting, but all doubts were silenced, for a moment, at the rise of the Mk. III Sentinels. Enormous and more powerful than ever, these were the machines to take down mutants according to Rachel, and seeing them fly over the night sky sent a terrifying chill down Beast's spine. When it came the time for the X-Men to strike at Master Mold, he was the one to find the vulnerabilities in the quasi-sentient machine and shut it down before it could become self-sufficient. In the follow-up bid from Magneto to take over the country by assassinating the President and demanding obedience, Beast was also in Washington to fight the Brotherhood, despite his long history with some of them as well as Polaris. When the fight calmed down, Hank approached by the S.H.I.E.L.D. director, Nicholas Fury, who had been trying to find the one responsible for taking down the Lizard years ago. Seeing Hank's heroic antics during the fight against Magneto, he offered Beast a spot in the Avengers, something that although Hank did not desire, he accepted as means to further the X-Men's Dream of cohexistence and dialogue. VIII: Hank McCoy, Avenger Hank's life in the Avengers was not easy, for despite his playful and outgoing demeanor, it was Beast's intelligence that proved itself a problem. Whereas he was fast friends with Dr. Banner, Wonder Man and Wasp, the blue-furred man couldn't help but notice Captain America's cold demeanor towards himself, Quicksilver or Scarlet Witch; or the shady connections of Stark Enterprises with Bolivar Trask and the Sentinels. Often he clashed with Giant-Man for his behavior, both with his wife and how the man did not lose an opportunity to bring up Ms. Marvel's comatose state being a mutant's fault. Despite it all, Hank helped put Vision together when the scraps of the former Sentinel prototype arrived, and in the end he became a valuable member of the team, even if one acutely aware of the compromises made by S.H.I.E.L.D. to put them together. Hank was an Avenger until the ascension of Apocalypse and his unleashing of the Horsemen upon Manhattan, when he was with the team when they fought the servants of the ancient mutant. Despite their power, and how easily they dispatched some of the Avengers, Beast found himself spared by them, no matter how hard he tried to stop them, seemingly under orders not to kill Henry McCoy. That allowed him to last until the X-Men took the field, and much to Hank's despair he was there when Bobby sacrificed himself to give his family a shot, profoundly hurting Apocalypse in the process and undoing the mental control suffered by Warren so he could be himself once more. In the aftermath of the battle, when Scott and Jean's son, Nathan, was kidnapped by the Akkaba, Hank rejoined the X-Men to take the fight to Apocalypse on the Blue Side of the Moon. Although the baby was rescued, it had not been enough, and infected by the T-O virus he was taken into the future by Mother Askani. With his life left in shambles by En Sabah Nur, when the time came to hunt him down with Cyclops, Wolverine and Archangel, Beast readily joined forces with them. IX: The Dark Reflection When Cyclops assembled the X-Force, Beast had his reservations, but the crimes of the Akkaba were too great to go without challenging, and trusting his long-time friend to do the right thing Hank followed along with Archangel and Wolverine. Their first stop was at the Hellfire Club of London, a place with ties with the ancient organization and famous families such as the Essex, the Braddocks and the Starsmore. Researching their archives revealed to Hank that their money funded operations everywhere, from above board enterprises to black markets and downright wet works operations. One of these secretive operations funded in the past, however, caught his eye, as it was a simple orphanage in Omaha, Nebraska, where Cyclops had grown up. Although they take some time to arrive, flying in the Blackbird, the X-Force finds that that underneath the orphanage was an abandoned facility for advanced scientific studies. In that facility the four men found Madelyne Pryor, a young clone of Jean Grey, and after some debate on what to do with the still-living, tube-bound girl, they agree to rescued her. As she comes out of her stasis, the redhaired girl sounded, and even acted, like Jean Grey, at least in the surface. Logan and Hank soon realized she displayed a greater propensity for using her mutant powers, something that culminated in a great display of telepathy when Archangel expressed his frustration with the lack of leads. Drawn to the Death persona within him, Madelyne managed to tap it just enough to give the men directions to their ultimate prize: The Usermaatra-setepenra space station, on of the lairs of the Akkaba clan. Arrival at the space station, however, proved to be surprising even if Beast was already expecting the unexpected: the whole place was littered with bodies, drained and dead, but that did not stop the X-Force. Whilst Archangel, Wolverine and Cyclops charged to finish their mission, which was to destroy the new body Apocalypse was to reincarnate into, Beast was left to his own devises in collecting all data available about the Akkaba clan. Much to his surprise, however, he found that guarding the archives of the station was nothing other than a clone of his, a man who introduced himself as "A much more interesting sequel to the sapiens-loving mutant previously known as Dr. Henry Phillip McCoy." Under him was a wounded woman, gasping for air under the crushing weight of the gray-furred Beast's foot, something that set Beast himself off. This dark reflection of Beast was similar, but very different from Hank, in how he walked, talked and even in how he looked, his gray fur hiding mutations Hank hoped were not native to his X-gene. In the fight that ensued, Hank learned that this version of him was a servant of Apocalypse, and that he would help the mutant judge the world to cull those he found lacking. Although Hank was stronger, a finer and younger specimen, somehow, his counterpart used his cunning to feign weakness and helplessness, leading to Beast dropping his defenses. Stabbing Hank with a serum, the older Dark Beast stood over Hank as he agonized on the floor, but was kept from finishing the man off by the now-unbound woman, who attacks caused improbably events to happen around her, and a dripping vat to almost kill Dark Beast before the managed to run away. The rescued, and rescuer, called herself Domino, and after much effort she managed to drag Hank to his allies inside the rapidly-collapsing space station. X: The Feral Heart The months that preceeded the Genoshan Genocide passed too fast for Beast, whose life changed dramatically thanks to the serum injected into him by his sinister counterpart. A concotion unlike anything he had ever seen, it rapidly sped his own evolution. Despite the gains in strength, speed, reflexes, it also provoked a gradual augumentation of his baser instincts, turning the once refined Hank into a man forever struggling to keep his erudite self above water in face of his more bestial instincts growing tenfold in intensity. The fears were the same as the ones that had haunted Hank ever since he came in contact with Krakoa, and ironically that is where Hank would find some reprieve. Along with Professor X he visited the island of Krakoa, and despite Hank's own reservations the ancient mutant was far more docile mutant than the one Beast had encountered so many years ago. Just as he assisted Charles in developing the seeds that would bear the fruits of his long-term plans for Mutantkind, Hank also learned more about himself in the land of Krakoa, finding some balance between his both sides of his nature. Along with Charlesa he outfitted the Habitat with many seeds engineered from the Krakoan vegetation, as well as further evolved the Shi'ar technology to serve the mutant purposes. Hank's crowning achievement, however, were the three miracle drugs, I, L and M, which allowed the X-Men to take their bold new step into a world where humans are made to live in harmony with other species. In no time, Beast realized that the X-Men, and the Habitat, with all its mutants and life, had become more than just a Dream to be protected, but an anchor of his own dwindling humanity, but it was not enough for the mutant. Everywhere in the world he knew other mutants were suffering with their genes such as he had been, and in efforts to take more cerebral work he kept an eye out of those youngsters. Eventually he would find Lauren Troumette through her online journals, detailing a process, Hank knew all too well. Having heard of the girl years before, Hank rapidly moved to assist someone he was sure to be a mutant, finding her on the nick of time to help her through the process of X-Gene activation. Sharing much in the way of intellectual commonground with the Canadian girl, he managed to convince her to join the Habitat, his efforts having paid off and allowing him to do good without furthering the effects of his volatile mutation.