Real Name: Nate GreyIn the Age of Apocalypse reality, Nate was raised by Forge, whom he looked to as a father. Along with Toad and Soar-on, they worked to help humans and mutants who were oppressed by Apocalypse. When Nate was in his teens, he and Forge were visited by the mysterious Essex, who was Sinister in disguise. Essex killed Forge, and then revealed to Nate his destiny of destroying Apocalypse. Nate was furious and managed to actually destroy the malleable Sinister. He made a lone assault on Apocalypse's fortress in New York, and wound up slugging it out with Holocaust, until Nate plunged a shard of the M'Kraan Crystal that he had picked up into Holocaust's chest. The resultant release of energy transported both of them back to the core reality (Earth 616).
Nate landed in the Alps, where he met (created) Madelyne Pryor, as mentioned above. He distrusted the X-Men from the start, most likely due to an early encounter with Professor X, inside whom he sensed the burgeoning presence of Onslaught. Nate hooked up with Threnody for a while after rescuing her from the Marauders, but they went their separate ways. Nate then got into a big fight with Madelyne, in which she siphoned off a lot of his power, and left him without his TK. Following that encounter, Nate was recruited by the Brotherhood, and Dark Beast used his technology to help Nate unconsciously use his lost powers. Nate left the Brotherhood after disrupting their plans to use a lethal gas, and ended up in NYC, where he has remained until recently, when he traveled to the Arctic to glimpse his future and saw that he would die in battle with a masked man (who turned out to be Stryfe) and take half the world with him. Nate then fought the Great Beasts, and shortly after, lost his telepathy to the Shadow King's psychic shockwave. Then, Stryfe's return happened and Nate, Maddie and Cable fought him off with the help of Witness, a man who had seen Nate's dream of apocalyptic destruction and had vowed to find Nate and prevent it from becoming reality. With Witness's help Nate was able to defeat Stryfe without resorting to the type of power that would have caused such destruction. Afterwards, Nate was targeted for termination by the Psi-Ops: Gauntlet, a strike force of telepaths with hi-tech weapons. He ended up defeating them, but only barely, and in the process both Ness and Madelyne apparently died. Then Nate had a few run-ins with Scott and Jean, and learned to respect them a lot, enough that he joined the team on a mission to save the Mannites. Then Nate was captured by Pestilence II, and brought to Apocalypse, who planned to transfer himself into Nate's young body. However, Cyclops managed to break free and disrupt the transfer, causing Apocalypse to merge with him instead. Nate was shaken by his "father's" death, and set off to find his proper place in the world. Maddie returned soon afterwards, but she was manipulating him in his sleep and making him destroy things. She finally revealed that she was a Madelyne from another dimension and she needed him to do something for her. This Maddie showed Nate how to shift between parallel earths, and tried to use him to power her engine for traveling between worlds. Nate rejected her, and found that reality's version of himself, who was slightly insane from his experiences. The two Nate's fought Maddie (who was really an evil Jean) and in the process merged parts of themselves to throw her off. This led Nate to consider himself a "mutant shaman," a healer and protector for his "tribe," which is really all of this Earth, just as his alternate reality self had done in that worlf.
Nate became immensely powerful, and had few qualms about using his power to mete out justice to
his fellow mutants. He then dealt with and stopped the madman Qabiri from destroying all the worlds on the Spiral, and finally, he confronted the Anti-Man, an alien sent to Earth to insinuate his genetic code into all living cells on the planet so that his people could harvest the resulting energy. To save the world from destruction, Nate merged himself with the Anti-Man, in essence "poisoning" the cells of Earth with his presence, and dissipating both of them across the globe.
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