Grunge (comics) - Worldstorm

Worldstorm

After the Worldstorm event, the origins of Grunge were further retooled. Owing his powers by careful genetic manipulations operated by the hidden Tabula Rasa group, and sharing somehow the soul of the previous iteration of the character, but none of the memories, Grunge lived his younger years as the stereotypical momma boy, sickly and nerdy in appearance and mannerism, and even more intelligent than Caitlin. However, when hitting adolescence, Grunge decided he was unhappy with his unpopular, bookish self, and decided to "reinvent himself", a new constant of his life, adopting a rebellious persona to distance himself from his overprotective mother, and covering his nerdish self with a more easy-going, frat-boy like persona. At that point, Tabula Rasa caught up with him, and he was kidnapped along with the other Gen-active boys. There Grunge, after helping in the escape, became a sort of big brother for his teammates, deeply caring for his new friends, and jokingly being the clown of the Gen¹³. His friendly and warm personality earned him the affections of his friends, until he was forced to slay Kid Apollo of the Authoriteens in self-defense, thing that leaves him in a deep state of depression, until Caitlin and Roxy manage to remind him how he acted in self-defence alone, and he always managed to defend his friends. Returning to his old self, but noting how much he was now fearing "the ability to reinvent himself", followed his friends in the city, until the end of the world hit. There, he unwillingly absorbed the makeup of electric energies, becoming a discorporated being: in this guise, he's able to help his friends against a group of scarred humans, resentful against the capes that brought ruin and misery in their lives. Returning to corporeal form, he dismisses Rainmaker's hypothesis about Caitlin developing a Florence Nightingale Effect for the now blind Burnout: instead, he decides to crack the tension their leader is feeling by proposing that every one of his teammates should share their vision of a post-atomic future. True to his cheerful exterior, and his desire to protect his friends by making them comfortable, he describes a world of intelligent cockroaches and scantly-clad babes in which every day he merrily challenges the humanoid cockroaches in a skate competition for world's dominion, and getting the girls.