BIOGRAPHY - Page 4
Faced with these trials, Boomer began to crack: she saw that everyone had been letting her down 
her whole life, and hardened her heart against any further pain. After a short while of self-pitying, during which she couldn’t stand looking at her self in a mirror, she adopted a new brasher attitude and the codename, Meltdown. Forcibly training herself to improve her control over her powers, she learned how to pull back her time bombs into her body. [X-Force (1st series) #51-52]
After an initial period of wild arrogance, though, Tabitha seemed to mellow out and settle back into her more bubbly personality from before.
Not much later, during an encounter with the Externals, Tabitha learned from Selene that Cannonball was not an immortal High Lord, and as such her fears of growing old and dying while he would stay young and healthy were no longer unjustified. [X-Force (1st series) #54]
X-Force continued to operate out of Xavier’s mansion until Operation: Zero Tolerance began, and Bastion and his Prime Sentinels got a hold of the Xavier Institute and all of the professor's files. Cable ordered the team to go underground under assumed names, but they refused to hide their heads in the sand like that, so he left the team to make their own choices. Many members went their own separate ways, but Tabitha stayed with the largest grouping afterwards (Warpath, Siryn, Moonstar and Sunspot), and these five decided to travel together for a time. Unfortunately, they had little direction and, after Sunspot's trust fund was tied up in legal proceedings, little money either. [X-Force (1st series) #70-71]
Oddly enough, Tabitha found Bobby to be somewhat attractive after he lost his money and loosened up a bit. The two of them became virtually inseparable on the road trip until, at the Burning Man festival, they suddenly started kissing in the middle of a dance. Before they could talk and figure out what that meant for them, Cannonball dropped in to spend some time with his girlfriend and his best friend.
Having Sam around only made them even more uncomfortable. Instead of really talking to Sam or to each other, Bobby and Tabitha fell back into each other’s arms... only this time, Cannonball caught them. He flew off, leaving Tabitha and Bobby feeling rotten with themselves. [X-Force (1st series) #75-76]
They made a go at having a real relationship after that, hoping to salvage something out of the mess they'd made, but they really weren't very compatible and were running mostly off of animal magnetism. After Sunspot got his assets unfrozen and began throwing around money like the arrogant rich kid he used to be, Meltdown started having even less of an interest in him than before. [X-Force (1st series) #78-80] When Cannonball decided to rejoin X-Force a few weeks later, things got even more tense between all three of them. [X-Force (1st series) #84]
As X-Force had finally put down roots in San Francisco, California, Tabitha got back in contact with her father for what seemed to be the first time since his accident. It was a less than happy reunion as she found out he had gotten married for the fourth time, and joined the Triune Understanding movement to boot. When she stormed out of the restaurant they were at, only to find Sunspot waiting outside (he was afraid she was seeing someone behind his back), she just blew up at him for it. [X-Force (1st series) #87]
A few days later, after a battle with the Hellions and their friend Siryn getting her throat cut open and losing her voice, Bobby wasn't showing much empathy and Tabitha finally just broke up with him on the street and walked off. They never got a chance to talk anymore after that, for Sunspot was picked up by operatives of the Immigration and Naturalization Service only minutes later and deported after his interrogation, as they suspected him to be the terrorist known as Reignfire. [X-Force (1st series) #91]
X-Force continued to have adventures both in the States and abroad, such as the time they traveled to Genosha and helped Pete Wisdom liberate the disembodied brain of his friend from Hammer Bay. [X-Force (1st series) #94-95] They also had a run-in with Selene, and were quite surprised to find Sunspot in her company. At first, there was some tension between them, but Bobby comforted Tabitha after she was exposed to an illusionary scenario about the man she had killed in self-defense way back when she was living in the streets. The incident enabled the two to part on friendly terms this time, even though Bobby joined Selene’s Hellfire Club afterwards. [X-Force (1st series) #97-98]
At the time the High Evolutionary took it upon himself to shut off all mutant powers on Earth, Tabitha was out by the waterfront, watching Sam practice his flying. His power cut out in mid-air, and he crashed into the bay, unconscious. Tabitha had to jump off the cliff-side to save him, and they wouldn't have made it if it weren't for the harbor patrol. Sam was in the hospital for days, and this incident was enough of a trauma to push the two ex-lovers back into each other's orbit, with the hint of rekindling their relationship. [X-Force (1st series) #101]
In the meantime, the sudden power loss really hit home for Cannonball, as to just how little they had been doing lately to help mutantkind. He got back in touch with Pete Wisdom, and together 
they devised a plan for reactivating X-Force as a covert strike team. Meltdown, along with Warpath and Bedlam, agreed to enter into this new arrangement, and they took up residence in an abandoned Nevada Hulkbuster base for extensive retraining for martial combat and the use of their powers. In particular, Tabitha learned how to direct the explosive force of her power into streams of guided energy, and was also heavily trained in computer hacking and manipulating digital information. [X-Force (1st series) #106-108]
The revamped X-Force fought the shadow wars that other people couldn't even see, against the 
likes of meat-spore stormtroopers, mutagenic bioreactors and assassins who carried the mutant gene for murder. After she almost lost Sam to that last threat, Meltdown confessed she couldn't bear to see him die, and the two of them became lovers again. [X-Force (1st series) #102-105, 109-110] While most of their missions were successful, they weren't without their share of troubles - Wisdom was apparently killed on their first mission back in San Francisco since leaving, and on two separate occasions their enemies tried to kill them in massive explosions.
The team’s undercover status turned out to be a weakness, though, for some new organization consisting of mutants that wanted to get rich and famous thought the name up for grabs. After buying legal rights to use “X-Force“ as their name, this group went public and soon became popular. When the original X-Force learned of this, they came out of hiding and confronted the new guys about the name and violating the original concept behind the team, it was already too 
late. [X-Force (1st series) #113, 115, 117] Apparently, the original X-Force disbanded after this, retreating from their recent hardcore offensive stance on mutant issues. Sam and Tabitha also went their separate ways.
Meltdown eventually resurfaced months later as a member of Cable's Underground movement, designed as a direct counter to the revived Weapon X Program. They succeeded in gathering a generous amount of evidence of wrongdoing and mutant rights violations on the program's part, but were undermined when they trusted a group of Weapon X agents who offered to switch sides and help them infiltrate and disable the program. They did get them inside, but once Meltdown and the other Underground operatives had sufficiently softened up those loyal to the current Director, the traitors' ringleader, Brent Jackson, betrayed Cable and the others, wiping them out with a psychic failsafe he had worked up. Tabitha and the others were only saved from becoming test subjects of Weapon X under Jackson's command by Marrow, who liberated them from the program after they had been mindwiped to believe they had been successfully destroyed Weapon X. [Weapon X (2nd series) #6-13]
Sometime thereafter, Cable learned of another threat to mutantkind, the voracious creatures known as the Skornn, and gathered and reunited X-Force in order to deal with them. Meltdown was among the former members he recruited for the mission. While both Cannonball and Sunspot were also involved in the conflict, Tabitha’s feelings for either man weren’t brought up. However, she revealed to have learned a new trick with her mutant powers when she channeled one of her time bombs through Shatterstar’s blade straight into chest of a seemingly unbeatable opponent. After the Skornn was also defeated, some of X-Force remained together, assisting Cable on Providence, an island nation he created. [X-Force (2nd series) #2-6]
Tabitha soon moved on, though, joining a para-military outfit known as the Highest Anti-Terrorist Effort, or H.A.T.E. As a member of the Nextwave Squad, Tabitha joined former Avengers Pulsar and Machine Man, and independent paranormals Elsa Bloodstone and the Captain as an elite strike force. Everything seemed on the up-and-up until Tabitha began snooping around, and discovered the marketing plan of the Beyond Corporation, H.A.T.E.'s financial backers. It turned out that Beyond Corp evolved out of the former terrorist cell known as S.I.L.E.N.T., and were 
planning to use H.A.T.E. and Nextwave to further their own sinister agendas. Tabitha brought the files she stole to the squad leader, Pulsar, and Nextwave hijacked a Shockwave Rider transport ship and defected from H.A.T.E. Tabitha and the others fought against their former employers, and defended the country from the Unusual Weapons of Mass Destruction unleashed by the Beyond Corporation on the general populace, until they eventually exposed and destroyed the true mastermind behind S.I.L.E.N.T. [Nextwave #1-12]