[hider=The Grunt]
[b]Name[/b]: Steve. Nobody knows his last name, as he only ever responds to any name-related question with "I'm Steve!" and a dopey grin.

[b]Persona[/b]: The Grunt. Not a persona picked by himself, for the above mentioned reasons.

[b]Appearance[/b]: [img]http://pre14.deviantart.net/5f50/th/pre/i/2011/165/b/e/frankenstein__s_monster_bw_by_spookygoss-d3ivrpm.jpg[/img]

Pale skin, accompanying a tall and somewhat muscular build, with black stringy hair and eyes left a cloudy blue through surgical scarring. Severe surgical alteration and staples left in his face and body after the fact have both left Steve looking like a real mess, a seemingly deliberate attempt to leave him incapable of finding proper employment. His clothing tends to be "whatever is given to him to wear", since his sense of fashion is adroitly lacking, and he rarely takes the initiative in finding his own clothes. However, he will almost always put on his favourite leather jacket with a blue-and-green "HC" symbol on the back over whatever he's wearing, the only piece of clothing he was left with after he was thrown out into the streets.

[b]Age[/b]: 28

[b]Archetype[/b]: Gifted

[b]Power set[/b]:

[i]Resistance I[/i] - Steve is far more durable than the average human being, capable of taking a lot of damage without falling. Whilst a bullet or strong enough laser blast will put him down nearly as readily as anyone else, the fists of the average human being can be weathered for an extended period of time, and even melee weapons won't do too much damage to him without sufficient force behind them.

[i]Escalating Strength I[/i] - Steve normally only possesses a relatively average degree of strength, being able to exert about as much force as the average human. However, when provoked sufficiently, he enters a state of rage that greatly increases his strength on the spot [roughly halfway between average human strength and a standard Strength empowered being of the same level], and further increases it as he continues to get more angry even beyond similarly-empowered individuals [up to double the force exerted by a standard Strength empowered being], the state typically only dissipating once the object or individual who has drawn his ire is beaten into the ground.

[i]Weaknesses[/i] - There's no getting around it: Steve is mentally disabled. Originally only mildly inconvenient for him, it has since been exarcerbated to a rather notable degree; whilst he can still function to some extent, he is very unlikely to ever achieve the full cognitive ability that a normal human adult possesses, and it means that his strategies rarely extend beyond "lumber over to the person hitting you, and hit them until they stop hitting you", never mind the day-to-day difficulties of life in general. Additionally, whilst his rage state can generally put him at a greater level of strength than a super of similar power to him, he starts off significantly weaker than the set strength levels of other strong supers, so he can be subdued before then if he hasn't yet gotten too mad; and even if he has gotten angry enough to boost his strength, said anger only further reduces his strategic abilities. Lastly, of course, while capable of shrugging off low-level magical or telekinetic assaults the same way he resists physical hits, he has no particular resistance to attacks against his mind, and is arguably less capable in that regard than a normal human given his disability, so supernatural persuasion such as mind control can quite handily turn him against his allies without much effort.

[b]Origin Story[/b]: Steve was born with a somewhat special mind. Which is to say, he was possessed of very mild mental disability, though admittedly nothing too restrictive. He's not sure what the exact diagnosis was, because his parents never told him, but he was always told that he could get through it and become a better man for it, and so he always kept a positive outlook on life even when things got difficult. He'd always been quite thick-skinned, as his teachers said, though he only figured out that this was also meant literally when he got into a fight with a school bully at the age of nine. His ability to gradually increase his strength only arose in his teenage years, first showing when another bully tried to insult him, and he accidentally broke the bully's ribs with a single punch to the chest; a good thing this was, for he had only recently gotten better at controlling his emotions, a trait which would continue to plague him for a while yet. Against all odds, however, his grades throughout schooling were quite decent indeed, and he even succeeded in entering a fairly good job for his condition, which he retained up until the age of 27, having decided that superheroing wasn't for him.

This is when catastrophe shattered Steve's life. He found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, and was captured by the goons of a B-class villain named Headcase, a man who had separated his overlarge brain from his body, and yet continued to live in spite of this. Obsessed with the brains of other supers, he decided that Steve would be the perfect base for a loyal henchman, to produce clone soldiers smarter than Steve yet possessed of similar emotional traits and enhanced powers by comparison, all modified in favour of Headcase himself. And of course, to acquire the necessary gene sequences and thought patterns, Headcase took out pieces of Steve's brain whilst he was still conscious, scarring him for life and worsening his retardation ever more significantly. The scientist even went to the trouble of surgically altering Steve's face multiple times and leaving in a great many staples to the point of irremovability even as infection set in, seemingly just because he wanted him to suffer.

Eventually, Headcase's experiments came to a conclusion, and Steve was thrown out into the streets with nothing more than a spare leather jacket, the reason cited as "the cretin's useless to me now". Indeed, what remained of the man who had once been present in Steve's body was traumatised by the whole process, remaining hospitalised for several months before the doctors even considered letting him leave, and even after the fact of his healing, he was left unable to perform tasks that had once been simple, and found that nobody really wanted to talk to people with ruined faces full of medical staples. Trying to remain upbeat even as depression began to set in, it was Steve's new social helper who suggested that he take up the business of heroism, and in turn who belittled the suggestion that the only reason to put Steve into heroism was to stop him becoming a villain when asked by a more astute-minded individual. With no other realistic options, and perhaps somewhat convinced that the prospect was enthralling by the social worker in question, Steve decided to put his powers to good use, and signed up to join a new group of small-time heroes called the Slight Heroics, with the idea to help reform the city of Dodgeville one crook at a time.
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