Mr. Mud/Spikeman
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
Steven Grange, alias Spikeman, is a supercriminal who has operated out of Kings Row, Paragon City since 1990, and is one of the few villains still living the life of a career criminal inside the Paragon City limits. As yet, he has avoided the allure of the Rogue Isles and the criminal haven it offers, and is still committing crimes, albeit sporadically, in and around Kings Row. As such, he spends a great deal of time in Ziggursky Correctional Facility and is considered something of a joke amongst Paragon City's heroic community.
Spikeman was originally a hoodlum from The Aqueduct district of Kings Row. There, he tried to make a petty living as a mugger, before trading up to become a hired goon, working for many of Kings Row's most prolific villains, from the crime bosses to the monologuing supervillains. It was while he was under the employ of one such supervillain, one Mr. Metallon, that he was unwittingly granted his superpowers. Metallon had hired a wealth of muscle from the streets of Kings Row in early 1990 and told them to meet in an abandoned warehouse in the Garment District, where he immediately locked all the doors, gassed them and spent the next three weeks experimenting on their unconscious bodies.
Many of those experimented on by Mr. Metallon died from the procedures he tested on them. Only two survived; Steven Grange, who awoke to find his skin bonded with a kind of animated steel which he could form and shape, and a young runaway who had signed up to work for Mr. Metallon to make enough money to put a roof above his head, and ended up being made of solid copper. He awoke alive, but unable to move or even speak. He is currently being kept in a S.E.R.A.P.H. lab on a life support machine in the hope that scientists will be able to reverse his condition and return him to a state of flesh and blood.
Mr. Metallon, of course, did not anticipate that his unwilling experiments would not wish to remain under his employ after being transformed into beings of metal; Spikeman certainly did not. With his new found powers he formed his metallic skin into a series of razor sharp spikes. Mr. Metallon and his robot guards were all found dead a week later, when the owner of the derelict warehouse opened the front doors to show it to a potential buyer.
Spikeman then became a bona fide career criminal. For a while he struck up a partnership with Mr. Mud, before a run-in with Statesman left them at odds. Spikeman was also known to work with Nightstick, Jumpsuit and Crimewave during the height of his career in the nineties. Spikeman was incarcerated in 1998 after being found as the only remaining villain in a wrecked transport that had been headed to Ziggursky Correction Facility before being ambushed. He served six years before breaking out in 2004. He remains at large.
