Polly

In life she has soft, shoulder-length brown hair with a light wave, worn loose, and she dresses for comfort during her pregnancy in a roomy sweater and easy trousers. Her look changes horrifically after death. Salvaged by Steven Erickson's scientists, her corpse is rebuilt into a gaunt, hairless cyborg wired to machinery that keeps her brain-dead body ticking over while she lingers in a permanent vegetative state.

She comes across as warm, tender, and hopeful, quick to appreciate any kindness shown to her, and she keeps her composure even as radiation quietly endangers her. What temperament her rebuilt form might have held is unknowable, since the process erased her mind, and the story frames her eventual death as a mercy that freed her from prolonged suffering as a tool used to torment her own daughter.

Found alone and destitute on the streets, Polly was approached by Dr. Elias Brandyworth, who quietly dropped a fortune into her collection jar. Taking the money, she agreed to join an experimental procedure run by a clandestine Pentagon department devoted to superhuman research. Its director, Steven Erickson, was pressing Brandyworth to engineer a living weapon capable of bending reality, and the plan hinged on Polly bearing enhanced children. Her womb was saturated with particles built to decay at high speed, meant to mutate the child she carried, and over the sessions she and Brandyworth grew close.

She clung to the hope that her baby would escape a life as government property, weeping when Brandyworth showed her a scan of the fetus and vowed to smuggle her out of the facility. That chance came when the Lizard League, drawn there by Brandyworth, assaulted the lab and pulled in Omni-Man and the original Guardians. As the fighting erupted, Polly went into premature, accelerated labor. Brandyworth carried her through the chaos while waves of atomic energy tore through her body, purple light spilling from her eyes and mouth in rhythm with her contractions.

He got her into his car and raced toward a hospital, but a final surge overwhelmed her before the doctors could act, and the strain proved fatal. Left with no other choice, Brandyworth cut the infant free and, to keep her hidden, swapped the newborn for the Wilkins family's stillborn daughter. Believed dead, Polly was secretly recovered by Erickson and revived only as a brain-damaged husk kept alive to breed further test subjects, none of whom matched Atom Eve. Eve eventually found her mother imprisoned on life support, and a stray bullet finally ended her during a later confrontation.