Mr. Mud, the Halfway Crook.
Mr. Mud
Player: @Mr. Mud
Origin:	Science
Archetype:	Brute
Threat Level:	50
Personal Data
Real Name:	David James Dirt
Known Aliases:	Dirty, Mud, D.J.
Species:	Human
Age:	33
Height:	6' 3"
Weight:	215 lbs
Eye Color:	Brown
Hair Color:	Black
Biographical Data
Nationality:	United States Citizen
Occupation:	Career Criminal
Place of Birth:	Kings Row, Paragon City
Base of Operations:	Haven, Cap Au Diable
Marital Status:	Single
Known Relatives:	Olivia Dirt (Mother, Deceased)
Known Powers
Able to turn his body to earth and mud. This most commonly consists of armoring parts of his body in soil, granting him nigh invulnerability, and morphing his limbs into various weapons for use in combat. These are usually blunt instruments, such as enlarged fists, hammers and clubs. Mud also has mild super strength.
Known Abilities
When unarmored, Mr. Mud is extremely agile, allowing him to escape quickly when being pursued. While not traditionally educated, Mud is intelligent and possesses street smarts in abundance. He knows both Paragon City and the Rogue Isles extremely well, allowing him to escape very quickly should a job turn sour.
Equipment
Mr. Mud wears a light utility belt, which contains the following: a communication device, medical pack, flashlight and a small, portable teleporter.
Mr. Mud is primarily concerned with monetary gain.

Mr. Mud was a supervillain who primarily operated out of Hyde Park, Kings Row (otherwise known as "The Basement") between 1991 and 2006, whose powers allowed him to morph his body into earth. In 2006, he moved to the Rogue Isles and became co-leader of the Rogues Gallery, and was at one time affiliated with the group known as The Sadistic Seven. He formed a strong, career-long partnership with fellow supercriminal Mindswipe.

Mr. Mud and Mindswipe both disappeared on 30 November 2012, after co-leading a final charge against Rularuu the Ravager alongside the hero Xanatos in an event that has come to be known as the Battle for the Multiverse. Both men have been declared legally dead, but it has been theorised by the genius Dr. Monster that they, along with a number of other heroes and villains, slipped into a hypothetical dimension known as Primal-13.

Personality

Mr. Mud was hardened by his early life on the streets of Kings Row; while he was often laid back and likeable, the early years of his life gave him a rocky exterior. While he knew that his life of crime was wrong, he simply saw his acts as necessary and concentrated on the fact that he was looking out for himself and elevating himself above his humble beginnings. His attitude to villainy was all-business; he very much liked to get things done with few gimmicks and walk away without incident. This did mean, however, that when Mud encountered law enforcement (be they heroes, the PPD, Longbow or another organised group), he defended himself with tenacity. He had a brilliant tactical mind, and would realistically assess his best chances of success or escape in any given situation, deciding on fight or flight accordingly. The record shows, however, that he enjoyed the fight more.

After many failed partnerships in the early years of his career, especially with hoodlums from his neighbourhood such as the villains Spikeman and Nightstick, Mr. Mud came to value loyalty above all else. His experiences with partners of fickle allegiance lead Mr. Mud to seek out a small number of villains who embodied loyalty and efficiency above all else; villains he worked with regularly and almost exclusively, chiefly Mindswipe. Of course, fate saw him team up with his fair share of megalomaniacs and psychopaths, but he often did his best to plan his crimes with sane, rational villains he could count on.

Character History

Mr. Mud was born David James Dirt in 1974, to Olivia Dirt. If David's father ever even saw his baby, he left when David was an early age. David grew up in High Park, Kings Row, in the area that in the eighties was known as The Basement ("as low as you can go"), and was infamous as a haven for criminals and gangsters. Conditions worsened in the Basement when Back Alley Brawler and the Regulators cleared the area of drugs. While this improved the quality of living for the more affluent members of the Kings Row community, those who had no choice but to survive from the drug trade were left out in the cold. Homelessness and unemployment ran high.

Mr. Mud is caught on camera emerging from a bank vault, wearing his original costume.

In 1991, when David was just sixteen, he and other teenagers in the Basement formed a street gang, the "Basement Boys." Refusing to fall victim to the kind of lifestyle that had befallen their parents, the members of the gang decided that turning to crime was preferable to turning to drugs. That summer, the war between the Shadows and the Petrovics was in full flow, and their drug trading significantly slowed. The only other dealer in the Basement was Frank "Knuckles" LaRusso, whose business was slowing due to the untimely deaths of many of his associates at the hands of the vigilante Charon.

Charon was once Robert Ian Black, a man whose fiancée had been murdered by Frank LaRusso's hitmen in 1989. Charon spent the years after her death training himself for his war on Paragon's criminal element, but often left his safehouses to silently assassinate members of LaRusso's crime family. In 1991 Charon launched his assault on LaRusso proper, and finally hit the streets of Paragon City as a vigilante.

During his first year of activity, Charon targetted the LaRusso gang, the Shadows and the Patrovics, but kept an eye on the Row's smaller outfits. His attention was drawn to the Basement Boys, whose petty crimes were slowly escalating. He dropped in on them during a late night raid on a liquor store in the Aqueduct, Kings Row.

In the chaos that ensued, one member of the Boys, Rem, was shot dead by the store clerk, while another had his leg broken in a struggle with Charon and was hospitalised for weeks afterwards. David fled the scene; Charon gave chase. The young man risked his life by jumping a fence into a quarry site on the outskirts of Kings Row and, during the ensuing chase, slipped and fell two-hundred feet into the bottom of the pit. He landed in dirty, rock, mud… and a strange, green liquid.

The quarry was owned by Crey Industries, and was officially shut down only two weeks after David's accident. The site was an operation intended to find a several barrels of mutagenic material that had been buried on the site by the Fifth Colun following their harbor attack in 1941. Crey had become careless with their blasting after weeks of minimal results, and only a week before had accidentally destroyed several barrels of the substance, leaving it to lie stagnant on the quarry floor.

David lay unconscious in the waste for several hours. During the following weeks, he discovered he now had superhuman abilities; he was able to morph his body into earth. Over several weeks of training, he learned to armor himself and create crude weapons from his hands.

Meanwhile, Charon hunted down the Basement Boys and offered them two options: they could become his informants and he would provide them with financial aid, or they could continue their lives of crime and he would be forced to turn them in. In light of Rem's death, the majority of the Boys became informants for Charon and, later, his team the Bone Squad. In return, Charon helped to build the Basement into what it is today: a low-cost housing development.

David, however, held Charon responsible for the death of his best friend, and decided to use his powers to make a better life for himself. He visited Incognito, an underground store specialising in tailoring costumes for supervillains. Tony Delsante, alias Incognito, asked David to recover some of the material that had given him his powers, and used it to make a costume that would morph with him. David renamed himself "Mr. Mud", and became a supervillain.

Mr. Mud made a name for himself in the 1990s. He gained a reputation as a henchman and enforcer, and worked for many of the top crimelords in Paragon City, including The General, "Knuckles" LaRusso and the undead mob-boss Vegas. He did two stretches in the Ziggurat, once for assault and once for superpowered robbery. On both occasions he served his time and was paroled before returning to a life of crime.

David's mother died shortly before his first stretch in the Ziggurat in 1993, having overdosed on superadine. He never truly dealt with her death and never spoke of her again. Her passing made him only more determined to pursue a criminal career as he had very little left to lose.

In 2004, Mud was working as an enforcer for Sebastian Frost when he encountered Charon for the last time. They fought ruthlessly, but eventually Mud was beaten, arrested and taken to jail. He was put on trial in 2005 and found guilty of three counts of superpowered robbery and four counts of aggravated assault. He was sentenced to thirty years in prison.

Mr. Mud was broken out of the Ziggurat in 2006 during an Arachnos jail break. He was released from his cell by fellow criminal Blake and escaped into the exercise yard. He was told that he was not out of Arachnos' targets for released, and refused entry to an Arachnos flier. Instead, he fought his way through Longbow defences and onto the streets of Brickstown, before his old contact Incognito drove him to Independence Port and arranged for him to be smuggled to Mercy Island.

Mr. Mud operated in the Rogue Isles between 2007 and 2012, with occasional visits back to Paragon City. He set up his new base of operations in Haven, Cap Au Diable. He eventually gained favour with the Arachnos elite, for a time training under Black Scorpion, and has also worked for Crey Industries, the Freakshow, the Family and the Carnival of Shadows. He also worked a long contract for the Golden Giza, acting as protection for its assets and even personally aiding Johnny Sonata.

Mud also formed a more formal allegiance with Mindswipe, following several team-ups in the 1990s, as co-leader of the Rogues Gallery. At its height, the group counted seventy-five villains amongst its number and was a very dangerous entity. He also became involved with a group known as The Sadistic Seven. The group dissolved following the Battle for Warburg.

Mud finally hit the big time in the Rogue Isles, and his reputation rose to the point that he often tangled with high-profile heroes such as Xanatos, Graphite and Dragonberry, and was a member of a strike force that battled and defeated the entire Freedom Phalanx. He grew in power over the six years before his disappearance, and became known (despite the fact that he had never been known to be a killer) as one of the most feared villains in America.

But internally, Mr. Mud was changing. In 2011 he became stranded in a parallel dimension during an interdimensional heist with the Rogues Gallery, and witnessed an alternative timeline in which he had chosen to become a superhero. This weighed on his mind over the next year, before Rularuu escaped from the Shadow Shard on 30 November 2012 in an event that has since been dubbed the Battle for the Multiverse.

Putting aside all rivalries, Mr. Mud and Mindswipe joined thousands of other heroes, vigilantes, rogues and villains in the fight against Rularuu, with Mud even fighting alongside Charon at one point during the battle. As things became desperate, Mr. Mud and Xanatos launched a final assault on the Ravager within the grounds of Ziggursky Correctional Facility, buying enough time for The Phantom Visage to banish him back to the Shadow Shard.

When Rularuu was sucked back into his prison dimension, Mr. Mud, along with Mindswipe and several other combatants, simply disappeared. He has since been declared legally deceased.

Criminal Activity

Mr. Mud and Mindswipe

Mud has been involved in criminal activity from a young age, primarily with the street gang the Basement Boys before he became a supervillain. After gaining his powers, he committed a string of bank robberies and fell into the employ of crimelords primarily operating in Kings Row. He worked primarily as muscle-for-hire, a bodyguard or henchman. He was often charged with warning off superheroes who were sniffing around his bosses, which led to some of his most volatile superhuman battles.

After a few years in the employment of Kings Row's crimelords, Mud went to prison. After his release (and skipping parole), he worked primarily solo. He committed several bank robberies and kidnappings. It was during this time that Mr. Mud first partnered with Mindswipe, and together they pulled off a string of high-profile heists; having been approached by Black Jack, they robbed a number of casinos, culminating in a heist at the highest-security casino in the world: Steel Canyon's The Golden Vault. Supposedly superhuman-proof, they took the Vault's owners for several million dollars. The Vault door, literally made of gold, now stands in one of Paragon's many museums… with Mr. Mud's fist imprinted in the metal.

Mud and Mindswipe stuck together, and their string of robberies continued until late-1995, when they were attacked by the Bone Squad during their final heist. This was the first time the world saw Mr. Mud's "Mud Monster" form; he grew to a size of twenty feet and transformed his body to pure mud, causing millions of dollars' worth of property damage to Kings Row monorail station during his battle with Charon, Mr. D and Ice Claw.

Mr. Mud then went back into the employ of crimelords, occasionally partnering with Mindswipe. It was during 1996 that Mr. Mud was contacted by an underground contact named "Rumble," who made his money by keeping books on superhuman fights. Mud agreed to join his greatest event yet: a royal rumble in the centre of Kings Row. Mr. Mud was in the remaining six supervillains when the entire operation was broken up by a group of heroes. Shortly afterwards, Mud was arrested and went back to prison until 1998.

In 1999, Mud and Mindswipe pulled off one of the biggest scams of their careers. Mindswipe discovered the true nature of the Clockwork King's control over his minions, and hi-jacked his army. In the days that followed, the robots ran riot, looting Paragon City and returning the profits to the villainous duo. The Clockwork King denied all involvement, and eventually Xanatos discovered that Mud and Mindswipe were behind the scheme. After a battle with Xanatos and Inertial, Mindswipe's link with the robots was broken and the pair was forced to retreat.

In the following five years, Mud worked largely for "Knuckles" LaRusso and gained a reputation as a fearsome employer. It was while working for Knuckles that he encountered Charon for a final time. He was then arrested, tried and sentenced to thirty years in the Ziggurat. After breaking out in 2006, he made his move to the Rogue Isles.

Mud worked with the Rogues Gallery in the six years after arriving in Mercy Island, and for a time was a member of The Sadistic Seven. Before his disappearance and presumed death in 2012, he had come to be considered one of the most powerful supervillains in the United States.

Powers

Mud Armor

To protect himself from harm, Mr. Mud armoured his body in earth, rock and mud. He covered only certain areas at any given time to avoid limiting his mobility. He was known, however, to case his entire body in earth in particularly dangerous situations. On two occasions he became the "Mud Monster": a twenty-foot tall being of pure mud.

Morphing

Mud used his powers in an offensive capacity in two ways: either by hardening his fists into solid earth, or morphing his limbs into blunt weapons. He was also known to launch clods of earth from his palms, and was able to enlarge his lower legs to give him better standing. His ability to morph also allowed him to leap long distances and climb buildings.

Super Strength

Mud possessed a level of super strength and was able to lift and throw, without strain, anything weighing below or equal to the weight of the average car. He gained much more strength in his "Mud Monster" form, and once hit the hero Xanatos with a school bus.

Earth Control

Mr. Mud was occasionally able to exercise a certain degree of control over the earth beneath his feet. This power did not develop further, despite Mud's attempts to enhance it with a suit of body armour he referred to as the "Seismic Suit", supposedly adapted from one worn by the original Faultline.

Contacts

Mr. Mud dukes it out with the Havok Brothers

• Mindswipe - Mindswipe and Mud worked together on and off throughout their criminal careers and became co-leaders of the Rogues Gallery
• Incognito - The owner of the Basement's very own supervillain tailor and Mud's mentor.
• Spikeman - Spikeman was one of Mr. Mud's many contacts from Kings Row, until a run-in with Statesman ended their professional relationship.
• Nightstick - A villain from Kings Row who Mr. Mud worked with on-and-off throughout the nineties, this villain has now disappeared without trace.
• Emperor Xanatos - Emperor Xanatos was both Mr. Mud's co-conspirator in the group The Sadistic Seven, and teammate in the Rogues Gallery.
• Bloodywedd - Leader of Malice in Wonderland and once a close affiliate of Mud's.
• Slaphappy - A villain allied to Mud through a mutual hatred of Charon and the Bone Squad.
• Nimrod - Former commander of the X-Patriots and eventually the third co-leader of the Rogues Gallery, Nimrod was a great ally of Mr. Mud and Mindswipe.
• The X-Patriots - Constant allies of the Sadistic Seven and Rogues Gallery, The X-Patriots had many close allies of Mr. Mud amongst their membership.

Villaingroup: Rogues Gallery

Adversaries

• Charon - Mr. Mud's creator and chief nemesis.
• Xanatos - One of Paragon City's premiere defenders and a frequent thorn in Mud's side.
• Graphite - Leader of a group formed to oppose The Sadistic Seven known as the Eidolon Eight.
• The Havok Brothers - Rivals of the Rogues Gallery and The Sadistic Seven.
• Nimbus - A hero Mr. Mud clashed with many times, both before and after his departure to the Rogue Isles.

Fiction

• Halfway Crooks - The origin of Mr. Mud.

To Contact This Character's Creator

• In-game: @Mr. Mud
• CoHGuru Forums: Charon
• Official Forums: Mr_Mud