Grizzly

"'People who tell you violence is never the answer are as dangerous as people who think violence is always the answer. Violence, like any tool, has its uses.'"

Summary
Formerly a deranged murderer, the man known as "Grizzly" is still incredibly dangerous, with claws that can shred metal, inhuman senses, and a rapid healing factor. Thanks to treatment and care, however, the man is in control of the beast, and he wants to start using his abilities for good, if a suspicious world will let him.

Backstory
“No good, no-account, useless Okie bastard.” were the last words John Allen Greshim remembered hearing before he lost his temper. He wouldn’t get it back for almost 80 years.

Dust Bowl Okie
John was born in Talequah, Oklahoma in 1920, to Robert and Genevia, a pair of farmers who had been unable to read the writing on the wall, even as family after family had already started fleeing west in the face of the rampant soil erosion. Which is to say that Robert refused to give up, and he was practically holding the family hostage. That lasted until the full-on dust storms began. In 1935, Genevia shot Robert and threw his body outside to disappear into the dust. By the time the storm died, she had packed everything they could carry and she and five-year-old John started walking west.

They hitched rides and snuck aboard trains on their way to California. Genevia met Odis Wilson, whom she would later marry, and the family would end up working at a pea farm in Nipomo, California. As John grew older, he began to shoot up like a weed and finding farm work became easier and easier, the bigger he got. His dark hair and thickening build made it clear to the local gossips that he absolutely wasn’t Odis Wilson’s son. That was when the fights began in earnest. He’d come home and tell his Ma that so-and-so had said such-and-such, but the truth of it was, John was just angry, or at least he felt angry, all the time. Odis, to his credit, never dignified the accusations with a reply, but Odis was also not a man given to physical confrontation, which stoked the bitterness growing in John’s mind. It was a powderkeg, and Mitch Hebson was the match.

Mitch’s family had made out when his own ma married a local hospital administrator. All of Mitch’s old friends were glad to see him, usually because he’d take everyone for food. But if Mitch didn’t like you, well there was no escaping him. When Mitch discovered the rumors about John’s parentage, it didn’t take him long to zero in on that particular weakness, leading him to eventually refer to John as a “no good, no-account, useless Okie bastard.”

And then everything changed.

The Rage
John was used to losing his temper, but this time was a different level. With an animalistic roar he threw himself at Mitch, knocking the older boy to the ground. While he stared with fists, John found himself scratching at Mitch, and those scratches digging deeper and deeper. It took six other kids to drag him off, though they let John go the minute they got a good look at him.

His jaw was slightly distended and his canines were now much longer than his other teeth. His fingernails had thickened, sharpened, and curved - now claws dripping with the blood of the other boy. He hadn’t been covered with hair and his ears hadn’t come up to a point, so he still looked…kind of human? But it was enough. The children fled for their lives and Mitch was never seen at the farm again, telling his parents he’d been attacked by a wild animal, which wasn’t entirely wrong.

John ran home where his family didn’t have any better reaction to his new visage, which refused to go away, than the children did. Genevia wailed about some sort of family curse from his father and Odis kept himself between John and the rest of the family. Eventually, a detente was reached, but it was only ever a temporary truce. John couldn’t go back to picking peas looking like this, but he could hunt in the South Central California wild country, which helped keep the family afloat.

And boy, could he hunt. John discovered that he was now faster and stronger than he had ever been before and that his injuries healed with a terrifying speed. Moreover, his senses were sharper - he could track by scent and see by starlight as well as by day. His enhanced hearing meant he heard every whispered concern from his family. For a time, he could lose himself in hunting, but he felt as though something was…fundamentally altered inside of him. When the call for soldiers went out in 1941, John headed to the Draft Board. Even they were not quite ready to take someone who looked like John, especially after he got into two fights while at the processing station, but someone else was there watching, and he approached John about something that “was not unlike soldiering, but probably better suited to a man of your talents.” He left three days later and has not been back to California since.

The Office of Strategic Services was building multiple teams of enhanced individuals to fight the Nazis and their own “Ubermenschen.” Some were widely known, like the Allied Front. Others were not. The “Hellhounds” were not, and John was sent to join the Hellhounds. A terror squad that fell on outlying positions and troops who had gotten turned around, the Hellhounds were a bogeyman story the German soldiers told to one another. John, given the nickname “Grizzly” both for his appearance and as a riff on his family name, fought through the whole war, and even made (and lost) some friends along the way, but what everyone identified as his “feral nature” only seemed to grow, until it sometimes seemed almost out of control on the battlefield. He tore full-grown men in half and would disappear into shadows, returning covered in blood. Whether he was becoming the monster everyone was afraid of, or simply being made into it, was not the sort of “chicken-or-egg” question anyone bothered to ask.

It was really only the fact that he was home for a mere five years before Korea, and three before the CIA sent him to Vietnam as an “advisor” that kept everything from coming apart earlier than it did. By the time he was brought home “for good” in 1972, he was barely civilized anymore, but he could play the role for a few hours here and there, which kept him on the right side of the law for a while. He bought a hunting cabin in the heights of the Rocky Mountains and sequestered himself there, praying that the hate in his heart for humanity might exorcise itself at last. Instead, humanity encroached on him, and the rest, as they say, is history.

In 1974, a development project started within earshot of John’s cabin. Eventually, some of the developers came by to try and buy the land, as John owned a great deal of it (He hadn’t been home enough to really spend much of his government salary). John adamantly refused to sell and the developers turned to harsher methods of persuasion, vandalizing his house and sending thugs to harass him at all hours. Anyone who actually knew John could have told them where this was headed. When a pickup truck full of shotgun-toting goons pulled up to the cabin one night, John was waiting for them; or, better to say, Grizzly was waiting for them. Of the nine men who came up there, two made it out alive, and one of those died on the way back to town from his wounds. The police, with plenty of encouragement from the real estate community, organized a massive manhunt that turned into a daily nightmare for law enforcement, reporting more and more troopers and volunteers lost. Selective parts of John’s history were publicized, emphasizing the “crazed ex-soldier gone wrong” angle, and he was saddled with the name “Grizzly” for the rest of his life.

From there, his life took on a somewhat cyclical pattern for much of the rest of the 20th century. Sometimes, he would go on local killing sprees for reasons only he understood. Sometimes, some costumed villain would offer him sufficient kindness to make use of his talent for violence until their mad scheme got thwarted, and Grizzly would have to run off again. His survival instincts were strong enough that he could live in the wild for months, if not years. Sometimes, he would swear to himself that he was never going to get near civilization again, but such oaths eventually crumbled. He was one of the darker stains on the grim history of superheroism in the 70’s and 80’s, and the proverbial “white whale” to a lot of vigilante heroes. But in 1991, a curious mix of opportunity and skill meant that Grizzly finally got snagged by the law, with the help of a muppet.

The Capture
Frank Feltson hadn’t even been a muppet for all that long, and he was having a terrible time getting anyone to take him seriously in his new form. Then Baron Vulkan and his new “Baron’s Legion” came to town. The Baron himself got captured nearly immediately, his appetite for grand speeches getting in the way of his need to escape, but, once again, no one seemed to be able to corner Grizzly, who was leaving a trail of bodies across the city. Feltson threw himself into the case, knowing that, however comical his new form might appear, it also meant he was uniquely positioned to tussle with Grizzly without actual loss of life. Feltson tricked the monster into entering a cage the zoo used for big cat transport. Suddenly, Frank Feltson was someone people took seriously again. And Grizzly, surprisingly for the first time in his life, was headed for prison.

Even the supermax security prison had some difficulty managing Grizzly, and he eventually found himself in Block X, cells where prisoners were lowered into a concrete block that was then covered with a steel ceiling. His unyielding fury eventually led to talk of taking him back to trial to see if a more…permanent…solution could be devised (not that anyone was exactly sure what it would take to kill the man). But Dr. Warren Harlan, newly appointed head of prison psychiatry, requested the opportunity to meet and work with Grizzly. At first, the prison flatly refused, citing too great a risk to the doctor’s safety. When Dr. Harlan threatened to go to the press with this violation of basic prison rights, the administration relented, perhaps hoping that they would be proven right and they could kill two birds with one stone.

Present
It was, quite literally, the work of a lifetime. For 30 years, Dr. Harlan met with Grizzly several times a week, occasionally drawing fire from the Warden for giving that “murdering psychopath” too much attention. But the results were, even for the Warden, undeniable. Clinical diagnoses of Antisocial Personality Disorder and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder gave way to a myriad of therapeutic and pharmacological treatments. In 2010, Grizzly was finally moved out of Block X. A few tough guys tried to see if the older man had lost a step, but whatever was keeping him young and vital also meant he was as brutal as ever in a fight, though he managed to stop short of killing anyone ever again. Grizzly went from being an animal they kept in the darkest cage they could find to nearly a model prisoner, though the Warden came to regret his efforts to try and entice Grizzly to turn informant.

In early 2021, Dr. Harlan knew he would be retiring soon, and he also knew that there was no practical way Grizzly was going to make any further progress in a prison system. It took 18 months of arguing, including this time actually going to the press, where journalists came across some of his declassified war efforts. After the parole board split on whether to grant him release, a team of pro bono lawyers took his case back to court on the grounds that he was mentally deranged at the time of his crimes. A botched presentation by the State’s Attorney led to the Judge commuting the remainder of Grizzly’s sentence. For the first time in 30 years, Grizzly was a free man.

Now he has come to Starlight City. He’s three decades out of date and still looks every inch the monster he was when he was captured. While the Colorado real estate developers had purchased his land for 1/3rd its actual value, they had actually purchased it, and so he has enough money to live on. The sights and the sounds of modern living bombard him no matter how tightly he closes his doors and windows, but he manages the unceasing fire in his chest with continued therapy and a battery of prescriptions. But 30 years of learning to empathize and reflect has opened something new - or at least something he’d never given much thought to before. He hears cries for help in the street and something inside says to go see what the matter is. He’s not even entirely sure anyone would ever be grateful for his help, but he is pretty sure that gratitude isn’t the point. Does the 21st century even have a use for a monster?

Trivia
Grizzly still tends to keep to himself, but he has demonstrated a tendency to head towards trouble when he perceives it, such as when a High School was besieged by dark reflections of the students, escaped from the mirror dimension.